Religion

The Nineteenth Century

In Ireland, members of the established Church of Ireland, as the Anglican communion was known, accounted for 53 percent of the Protestant population in 1871. Presbyterians constituted most of the rest, 39 percent, leaving only 8 percent to be accounted for by Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and other minor denominations. In Canada, the situation was somewhat different; the Anglicans were the largest religious group here, too, but Presbyterians were outnumbered by Methodists. According to a sample drawn from 1871 census data, 36 percent of Canada’s Protestant Irish were Anglican, 25 percent Presbyterian, 30 percent Methodist, and 7 percent Baptist. The Baptists were heavily concentrated in the Maritimes, where Irish had settled among and intermarried with descendants of Baptist New Englanders.

Among the Irish, emigrating Presbyterians came almost exclusively from the parts of northern Ireland that had been colonized by Lowland Scots during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though Presbyterianism claimed the adherence of a majority of Ulster Protestants at home (53 percent in 1861), the Presbyterian denominations were significantly under-represented among Canada’s Irish. They accounted for fewer than 17 percent of the Irish heads of family in Ontario just after Confederation and for only 24 percent of that province’s Irish Protestants (as they did in Canada as a whole, as then constituted). They occupied third place after the Anglicans, who accounted for 37 percent and the Methodists, who claimed the adherence of another 24 percent. In New Brunswick, Presbyterians accounted for 31 percent of the Irish Protestants for whom a denomination has been ascertained, and for 38 percent of the immigrant generation. Presbyterianism, then, may have been more significant among New Brunswick’s Irish than among Ontario’s but to a diminishing degree and still less than in the homeland.

This under-representation is explained partly by the high levels of Protestant immigration to Upper Canada from southern areas such as Tipperary and South Leinster early in the nineteenth century, areas that had been planted with English rather than with Scots, and partly by the importance of Belfast rather than Derry in immigration to the port of Quebec. Saint John had stronger links with Derry. As well, much of the emigration of Ulster Presbyterians continued to follow the well-worn path to Philadelphia and the southern backcountry of the United States that had been established in the eighteenth century. The correspondence of William McLeese, a Presbyterian millwright from north Antrim, makes clear that the most common destination of his former neighbours was Philadelphia, where the massive numbers of northern Irish names in the city directories testify to the long continuance of this migration corridor. Most of the few friends who joined McLeese in the Ottawa valley eventually drifted off to Pennsylvania. Presbyterian under-representation in Canada was no doubt exacerbated by cross-cultural marriages in later generations.

The Irish Presbyterian synods were unable to mount a missionary effort and so their emigrating clergy, unacceptable to the Church of Scotland before 1838, were compelled to affiliate with the Scottish United Pres-

Sources: A. Gordon Darroch and Michael D. Ornstein. “Ethnicity and Occupational Structure in Canada in 1871: The Vertical Mosaic in Historical Perspective,” Canadian Historical Review, vol. 61, no. 3 (1980), 305–33. Table 1; Ontario 1871 – OGS/NA data base; NB 1851 – Peter Toner, ed. New Ireland remembered. Religion has been identified from other sources for 60% of population. Historical Essays on the Irish in New Brunswick (Fredericton, N.B., 1988).

* Includes Methodists.

bytery or the United Associate Synod and their people similarly to affiliate with Scottish presbyteries and clergy. Even the early Ulster Presbyterians of Truro, Nova Scotia who requested a minister from the Presbytery of Newtown Limavady in Ireland in 1770 were in the end supplied by the Associate Synod of Scotland. At first, all the Church of Scotland clergy in Upper Canada were raised and educated in Scotland, though some Irish ministers were admitted after an accommodation was reached with the Synod of Ulster in 1838. In the schism of 1843 over the issue of state support, the Irish sided massively with the voluntarist “Free Kirk” and in 1871 nearly four-fifths claimed membership in the Canada Presbyterian Church and fewer than 20 percent in the Church of Scotland. Because of their position within Scottish synods, emigrant Irish Presbyterian ministers were unable to maintain an Irish Presbyterian identity abroad.

It was only as a Scottish institution that the Church of Scotland could claim, on the basis of the 1707 union of the English and Scottish crowns, the privileges of establishment in the colonies. While many Irish Presbyterians rejected this association of church and state, the Church of Scotland supported it and therefore strove to enhance its Scottish identity by promoting the establishment of St Andrew’s societies and recruiting clergy conversant in Scots Gaelic. In eighteenth-century Ireland, Presbyterians were dissenters rather than members of the state church as in Scotland, and both at home and in the southern backcountry of the United States they became legendary political radicals. In Ireland itself, Presbyterian radicalism diminished rapidly after 1800 as rising Catholic assertiveness provoked a common unease among Protestants that moved them politically to the right. In the American republic, Presbyterians continued to find an outlet for their older liberalism, but in Canada the picture is unclear. Canadian historians have perceived Presbyterianism as a Scottish denomination and so little work has been done on the role of Irish clergy and laity in the various Presbyterian denominations or on their stance in the various schisms.

The second largest denomination among Canada’s Protestant Irish, Methodism, had begun in the mid-eighteenth century as a movement to revitalize the Church of England from within. Its leader, John Wesley, made twenty-one missionary tours to Ireland, beginning in 1747. Following his death in the 1790s, the English Methodists became a separate denomination. The Irish Wesleyans, who were fewer in number, did not make this decision until more than a decade later.

Methodists accounted for 34 percent of Irish Protestant families in Ontario in 1871, equal to the proportion of Methodists in the province’s Protestant population generally, but in marked contrast to Ireland itself where fewer than 7 percent of Protestants claimed this affiliation. They accounted for less than 15 percent of the Irish population of New Brunswick, still an over-representation but not as large a one. Methodism later contributed significantly to the United Church’s majority position among the Protestant population of Irish descent (53.2 percent in Ontario in 1931, 52.5 percent in Canada as a whole). It is clear that the denomination was much more important to Irish people abroad than it was at home. The question is why this was so.

An earlier generation of historians emphasized that Methodism was a religion of the frontier, one that accorded well with the independent spirit that they supposed was necessary for successfully carving civilization from the wilderness. Methodist circuit-riding – the practice of preachers in ministering to large areas on horseback – was also perceived as especially suited to the needs of a scattered pioneer population, in contrast to the supposedly more sedentary ministry of the Anglicans and Presbyterians. Evidence of the extent of chain migration and clustered settlement patterns has contributed to the eclipse of the frontier explanation, and historians tend now to lay greater emphasis upon the importation of Methodist religious adherence than they once did.

Nonetheless, it was not until the 1850s that Methodism overtook Anglicanism as the dominant Protestant denomination. This coincided with the evaporation of Anglican pretensions to establishment status and also with the rapid disappearance of the frontier of arable crown land, the decline of Irish immigration, and growing concern for social respectability among the “sturdy yeoman farmers” who had built themselves a secure position in the rural economy in the decades since their arrival. It was a more staid and less emotionally demonstrative Methodism that attracted converts after mid-century. It was also a Methodism that was securely Protestant in an age when Anglicanism compensated for its loss of state support by seeking legitimation in its heritage, a quest that led to adoption of liturgy and rituals that seemed too Roman Catholic for many Irish Canadians.

A largely American Methodist laity in Upper Canada at first was supplied with clergy by the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, but the loyalty of this body became suspect during the War of 1812. Thereafter the dissatisfaction of British immigrant Methodists, many of whom were Irish, prompted a break with the American body in 1828 and an association with the English Wesleyan Conference in 1833. The Canadian circuits inherited from their American antecedents a stance of independence from the Church of England that was sustained at that time by neither the English nor the Irish conferences, however, and this led to a severing of the connection with the English conference in 1840.

The Irish in Canada remained associated with the Canadian Wesleyan Conference and were under-represented in denominations more closely associated with other ethnic groups, such as the Episcopal Methodists, a conference of mostly American settlers who rejected association with the English Wesleyans in 1833. In 1871, 71 percent of Ontario’s Irish Methodists were Wesleyans, in contrast to 62 percent of the province’s general Methodist population. Another 4.7 percent, about 1,000 families, were Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians. These were English sects to which some Irish families converted in Canada for reasons of convenient proximity, intermarriage, or philosophical conviction.

High levels of Protestant emigration from Ireland left the Irish conference barely able to sustain its numbers at home and completely unable to mount a missionary effort. Early appeals for clergy by Irish emigrants were directed to England, but the Canadian Wesleyan Conference soon began to supply its clerical needs internally. Many of the domination’s Canadian clergy and local preachers had been Methodists in Ireland or were born into Irish Methodist families, and the place of Ireland in the denomination’s history by mid-century began to assume a mythological importance out of all proportion to the reality. The Canadian Wesleyan Conference acknowledged in 1864 that “we hold ourselves under obligation to the labours of our Irish brethren for many of the most valuable men in our church and ministry in this country, from its earliest history to the present time.” In 1866 there were 134 Irish-born Methodist clergy active in British North America at a time when there were only 167 in Ireland, and one source lists more than 225 Irish-born ministers and probationers active in Canada before 1900. The Christian Guardian (Toronto, 1829–1925) nonetheless warned in 1872 that, though “the honor of planting the first seed is justly due to Irish Methodists . . . the whole of American Methodism has not grown from that root. There have been many more important plantings from England.” It was still thought prudent to minimize the American contribution.

Methodists from Ireland, indeed, were thought to have sown the seeds for the denomination’s growth both in the United States and in Upper Canada, though the founding emigrants were neither Irish nor English by descent. They were German Palatines, descended from the refugees settled in County Limerick in 1710. The Embury, Heck, and Lawrence families, converted in Ireland by Wesley himself, had sailed for New York in 1760 and founded the John Street church there. Migrating later to Upper Canada as Loyalists, they were credited with founding the first Methodist class meeting in Upper Canada in Augusta Township. Though there are other claimants for the role of founder in both countries, the Palatines became respected figures in Methodist hagiography as the pioneering Canadian generation passed away and as American Methodism approached its centenary. The dominant figure in the legend was Barbara Ruckle Heck, about whose religious life comparatively little is known. The paucity of information allowed later generations to make of her what they wished: a “mother in Israel” possessed of the nurturing qualities idealized by the Victorian middle class, a staunch and devout exemplum to women active in Methodist causes, an American patriot who set religion back on its proper course after the downfall of Puritanism, a Canadian Loyalist devoted to the British crown.

Though about 80 percent of the Palatines in their major nineteenth-century Ontario colonies were Methodists (most of the remainder were Anglican), the Palatines, as “founders,” assumed a disproportionate stature in Methodist mythology. Only 34 of 819 obituaries of Irish immigrants published in Ontario’s Methodist newspapers between 1836 and 1872 commemorated natives of County Limerick, and in fact Methodists emigrated in greatest numbers from the regions that seem to have contributed most in general to Canada’s Irish Protestant population. South Ulster accounted for 43 percent of the total number of obituaries, with Fermanagh by far the largest contributing county. The border counties of Sligo and Leitrim added another 8 percent, bringing the regional total to 51 percent. North Ulster by contrast accounted for only 15 percent, even though the non-Presbyterian Protestant population there was approximately equal to that in south Ulster. Substantial pockets of Protestants in the south that contributed heavily to early post-Napoleonic emigration also contributed significant minorities of Methodists: the southeast (Wexford, Wicklow, and Kilkenny) accounted disproportionately for 86 of the obituaries (11 percent), Tipperary for 32, and Limerick, with its heavily Methodist Palatine population, for 34, nearly as many as the number from Down and Antrim where the non-Presbyterian Protestant population was six times as large. Cork and Dublin came next, followed by the remaining southern counties, which contributed a scattering of individuals. These numbers suggest that migration to Ontario seems to have come disproportionately from south-central Ulster rather than from Protestantism’s north Ulster heartland.

The emigration of Irish Methodists was a consequence of the economic and political circumstances faced by Irish Protestants in general and did not relate specifically to their Methodism. Friendship with class members who had emigrated was likely to influence the decisions of individual Methodist families to follow in their footsteps; however, most of the denomination’s strength in Canada was the result of conversions, largely from Anglicanism.

Unlike emigrant Irish Presbyterians, who had to find a place for themselves within the Scottish Church, and the Methodists, who contributed to the rise of an independent Canadian conference, Irish Anglicans found themselves on the side of the establishment. The de-nomination’s official title was the United Church of England and Ireland, a name bestowed upon the British church by the 1801 Act of Union. The name was also used in official documents in the colonies and was reiterated in the name adopted by the six British North American dioceses when they combined to form the Provincial Synod of the Church of England and Ireland in Canada in 1860; it was retained until the General Synod of the Church of England in Canada superseded it in 1893. The name was no mere semantic nicety, for the influence of Irish clergy in the colonies was profound. Trinity College, Dublin, was the greatest single source of Upper Canadian clergymen. The Irish Anglicans were staunch advocates of the association of church and state. At home, the Church of Ireland stood as a bulwark of the privileges of the Protestant minority, supported by tithes paid by members of all denominations and preaching loyalty to the British crown. Emigrant Irish Anglicans continued to uphold the principle of state financial support and believed strongly in the duality of the British subject’s duty to both God and king.

It has been argued that Irish Anglicans brought a new religious vigour to British North America that had been lacking in its pre-1815 American period. They certainly brought a “low church” suspicion of Roman Catholicism that was to provoke much dissension within the Anglican communion in a later generation. By mid-century, Irish Anglicans were among the most vociferous opponents of the introduction of “high church” practices that harkened back to Anglicanism’s roots in medieval Catholicism. The anti-Catholicism implicit in the low church position lay dormant for much of the 1820s and 1830s, though it flared up in areas such as the Ottawa valley where there was a strong Catholic presence. The issue grew more worrisome in the context of rising Catholic immigration in the 1840s and growing Catholic institutional organization thereafter. It was this sort of assertiveness in Ireland that had led many Irish Anglicans to seek refuge in congenially Protestant colonies abroad.

In Britain the rise of institutional Catholicism was matched by government initiatives aimed at loosening the ties of church and state. Anglican disestablishment was achieved gradually over several decades, and was actually seen as an opportunity to focus on the spiritual by many church leaders. But it also left international Anglicanism with the problem of legitimizing itself theologically once it was no longer able to realize its role as the partner of the old Tory state in the promotion of social order. The church leadership found its answer in a rediscovery of its roots. It laid claim to a morally exclusive status based on apostolic succession and encoded its history in a revitalization of medieval liturgy, vestments, and architecture.

This was the essential meaning behind the tractarian and ritualist movements that began in England in the 1830s. Tractarianism arose in response to parliamentary abolition of a number of Irish bishoprics. Involving a renewed appreciation for the “primitive Church,” it was supported by many prominent theologians but opposed vociferously by clergy of a more evangelical bent and by those who viewed such changes as a dangerous or unwelcome reversion to “Romish” practices. Protestant Irish were particularly wary of such changes, and many of the Irish laity in the colonies and a significant faction of the emigrant Irish clergy took the “low church,” evangelical position in the arguments that wracked the denomination.

The Upper Canadian laity and clergy, up to the 1830s at least, on the whole shared a low church stance. John Strachan, who was created archdeacon of York in 1827 and bishop of Toronto in 1839, held other opinions. Perhaps typically of a convert – he had been raised a Presbyterian – Strachan was more Anglican than most Anglicans. He was a high churchman whose authoritarian ideas about church government and Tory political views about the role of the church in inculcating loyalty to the state were balanced by a separatist tendency absorbed from observation of the American Episcopal Church. Cut off politically from England, the latter had of necessity emphasized that the church’s authority derived not from the state but by apostolic succession from the days of the primitive church. Strachan was determined that the church in Upper Canada should be free to set its own agenda. This purpose lay behind his vigorous attempts to maintain the Church of England’s exclusive control over the province’s “clergy reserve” lands, for the revenue to be derived from this source would guarantee the church’s financial independence.

There was an influx of Irish clergy into Upper Canada in the 1830s, an influx that Bishop Charles James Stewart, Strachan’s predecessor, attributed to the “tithe war” in Ireland; others cited poverty as the cause. Strachan, for his part, was critical of the new recruits. He noted in 1836 that “the clergymen who came to this country from Ireland are strangely Calvinistic in their sermons – and go much further than those who are called Evangelical in England.” Yet the Irish clergy continued to come to the colony and to assume parishes and missions mostly in its western half, encompassed by Strachan’s own archdeaconry of York. At least twenty graduates of Trinity College, Dublin, were found among the Upper Canadian clergy in 1840, and half of these occupied parishes in the western portion of the province. Their location was partly a result of the fact that the western part of Upper Canada was then being opened to intensive settlement, and it also reflected the priority that Strachan gave to missionary activity.

In the 1850s and 1860s, in response to the much increased population of the province, the diocese of Toronto, which had included all of Upper Canada, was divided. The first diocese to be carved out of Toronto, in 1857, was the diocese of Huron, with its cathedral church at St Paul’s, London. To the east, a second diocese was erected in 1862, centred on Kingston. Both new bishops were elected rather than appointed, in part a recognition of the increasing importance of lay contributions to the maintenance of the church following its loss of state support. The diocese of Huron became a bastion of the low church party. Led by a strongly Irish clerical faction, lay representatives secured the election as bishop of Benjamin Cronyn, an Irishman and avowed opponent of ritualism. Most of the clergy who supported his election had immigrated in the 1830s and were the products of an evangelical curriculum at Trinity College, Dublin. At Kingston, the second Irish bishop in Upper Canadian Anglicanism, John Travers Lewis, was elected to the diocese of Ontario in 1862. In both elections the lay vote proved crucial.

Previous interpretations of lay opinion did not put emphasis on imported politico-religious attitudes, concentrating instead on the role of the frontier. The study of Irish settlement patterns, however, raises questions about the merits of this approach. Clustered settlement and chain migration constituted the mechanism that populated the Huron District, home, for example, of the largest concentration of Tipperary Anglicans, southern Irish Protestants who nurtured firm convictions against Roman Catholic practices. They dominated the congregations at Arva, Clandeboye, St Mary’s, and elsewhere. The backgrounds of the settlers were far more important in determining their point of view on liturgical matters than any mythical frontier independence or the influence of American democracy.

The rank and file among the Protestant Irish were always suspicious of Roman Catholicism, the distinguishing characteristic of the majority population in their homeland who they had reason to suspect were opponents of the British constitution and their own accustomed way of life. In the diocese of Ontario lay the greatest concentration of Irish Protestants in British North America, and among them Lewis’s nationality attracted widespread support. His theology, once it became widely known, did not. While the Church of Ireland as a whole was never to prove responsive to the ritualistic innovations of English tractarianism, instead pursuing an evangelical “Protestant Crusade” designed to convert Irish Catholics to the state church, a minority at Trinity College embraced tractarian tenets. John Travers Lewis was one of these, and he imparted a markedly high church character to his Upper Canadian diocese by recruiting like-minded clergy.

In Huron, the evangelical Bishop Cronyn contended with a hostile church hierarchy in Toronto, and to consolidate his position he established in 1863 Huron College, now part of the University of Western Ontario, as an alternative to the high church Trinity College in Toronto. In the diocese of Ontario, battles were waged between Lewis’s clerical followers on the one hand and large segments of the largely Irish Anglican population on the other.

Similar battles raged within Anglicanism across British North America. In the diocese of Montreal, founded in 1850, William Bond Bennett recruited clergy from Huron to fill pulpits in Irish parishes in the western parts of Lower Canada, and he eventually established his own training institute, Montreal Diocesan College, as a low-church counterpoint to tractarian Bishop’s College in Lennoxville. In New Brunswick the low church stance of Irish Anglicans accorded well with the views of the laity of Loyalist descent, and efforts by the province’s first bishop, John Medley, and the clergy to promote ritualism met with vocal opposition.

In the diocese of Toronto, Strachan’s successor, A.N. Bethune, continued his mentor’s program but there was strong opposition there to ritualism among theological conservatives, who included many Irishmen. After Strachan’s death in 1867 Bethune proved unequal to the task of holding the opposition in check. Evangelical clergy and prominent laymen established an evangelical association within the diocese to combat the spread of ritualism. In 1877 they founded an evangelical divinity school, Wycliffe College, and two years later a moderate, Arthur Sweatman, was elected bishop as a compromise candidate. Finding a prelate sympathetic to their views, the evangelicals disbanded their association and further disruption was averted.

Internal dissension reached the point of crisis in the early 1870s as the ritualist initiative moved into high gear. Some disaffected low church families and a number of congregations withdrew and affiliated with the more Protestant Reformed Episcopal Church in the United States. This denomination captured a number of low church congregations in New Brunswick and won support also in the diocese of Ontario and in the city of Toronto. Reformed Episcopal churches were mostly located in cities where opposition to tractarian prelates was sufficiently concentrated and prosperous to support a breakaway congregation. Their supporters were heavily middle-class. They were mainly though not exclusively Irish Anglicans. Though anti-Catholicism permeated the newspaper debates of the 1870s, many religious conservatives simply found that the Reformed Episcopal Church more closely resembled the Anglican Church they had grown up with than did the latter-day Anglican communion. The schism compelled Anglican bishops to admit of greater diversity within their own denomination, and their tacit acknowledgement that certain parishes would be allowed to remain low and others high prevented the defections from continuing. Over time, most of the innovations that provoked such discontent in the nineteenth century achieved widespread acceptance, though some parishes still retain a simpler form of worship than others.