British North America, like every other part of the nineteenth-century English-speaking world, was an intensely sectarian, if not intensely religious, community. The fundamental division between Protestant and Roman Catholic was here unhappily exacerbated; for the French-Canadians, a very considerabble part of those who swore allegiance to the old faith, were also clearly marked off from their fellow citizens by their different language and social heritage.

The basic dichotomy of these two ways of life was to cause infinite misunderstanding and conflict in the future; but, in the early nineteenth century the divisions in the great Protestant body itself - the breach between the Churches of England and Scotland on the one hand and the evangelical sects on the other - awakened even more contention and animosity.

Throughout British North America there were no established churches in the English sense of establishment; but the Church of England and, to a much lesser extent, the Church of Scotland, obviously enjoyed the patronage of government and the support of the quality; and, in Upper Canada at least, this superior social station was strongly buttressed by the lavish endowment of the public lands reserved for 'the support of a Protestant Clergy' - an endowment which the Church of England at first claimed as exclusively its own. If the Anglican Church had been able to retain the allegiance of the great majority of the population, as in England, its claims and privileges would not have been so objectionable or so quickly questioned; but in fact its assumed primacy was unreal.

Despite the devotion of many Church of England clergymen to the needs of their enormous, primitive, backwoods parishes, the evangelical sects proved more successful on the frontier; and the Methodists, the Baptists, and the ministers of the Free Church gained from the two older communions.

The opposition to the position, the infulence, and the pretensions of the Church of England ranged fairly widely across British North America. It raised everywhere the general question of the relations of church and state; and in Upper Canada it took the very intractable form of an acrimoious controversy over the disposition of that unlikely Pandora's box of troubles, the Clergy Reserves.

A substantial number of people - members of the Church of Scotland, for example, and some Wesleyan Methodists - would have been eager or prepared for a division of the proceeds of the Reserves, on some reasonable basis, among the different Protestant communions. But the disputes and the heart-burnings which would almost certainly be provoked by any conceivable method of division, prejudiced many people against this solution from the start; and there was still a larger number of Protestants who emphatically disapproved in principle of any state support, however equitable, for organized religion. The 'volutary principle', as it was called - the principle that churches san sects should be supported by the contributions of their own adherants and without assistance from the secular state - was a principle which always had the endorsement of the Baptists and increasingly won approval from the Methodists and members of the Free Church.

The quarrel between the governing class and the frontier society over the religious and cultural institutions of the new British North America did not end here. The Church of England's exclusive claims to ecclesiastical endowment were hotly denied and attacked; but so also was the leadership which it had instinctively assumed in the field of public education. If British North America was inclined to a bitter sectarianism in religion, it was also passionately concerned about education; and in every province the establishment of a good primary and secondary school system and the founding of suitable institutions of higher learning were subjects which inspired a great deal of lively debate. The evangelical Protestants were just as convinced as the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics if the indissoluble connection bewteen religion and education; but the bitterly resented the dominating authority which the Church of England had acquired in the first provincial universities - the King's Colleges at Halifax, Fredericton and Toronto. The founding of rival denominational colleges - the Baptist Acadia College in Nova Scotia, the Presbyterian's Queen's College and the Methodist Victoria College in Upper Canada - was one answer to the problem as the evangelicals saw it. But it was an answer which profoundly dissatisfied many; and the pressure for large provincial non-sectarian universities, such as Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and the future University of Toronto in Upper Canada, grew steadily.