Product Description

In their heyday, Ontario's churches were the acknowledged arbiters of acceptable belief and respectable behaviour. Denominational affiliation was a key factor in determining whom people married, what colleges they chose for their children, how they voted, and in some case what they wore.

The central role of religion in provincial life ddid not spring spontaneously form the pious inclinations of settlers; it was carefully planted and nurtured by missionaries from Britain and the United States. Theirs was a continuing struggle, beset with relics of frontier barbarism on the one hand and preoccupation with material progress on the other. Their dominant position had scarcely been won when it began to be threatened by the emergence of new social and intellectual patterns. But the roots still run deep: even today one has only to propose changes in the school system or in Sunday-retail legislation to ddiscover how deeply the churches have shaped provincial assumptions and attitudes.

John Webster Grant traces teh development of religion in Ontario from before the arrival of European settlers until the end of the nineteenth century. Here we meet sober (and not so sober) representatives of the 'three churches' of England, Scotland, and Rome, ferverent Methodist saddle-bag preachers, plain Mennonites and Quakers, colourful Children Of Peace, and many others. We follow the course of conflicts and controversies that arose from different views of the appropriateness of government aid to churches or their educational institutions. We see Ontarians trying to change the world or to maintain ancestral folkways, in either case for religious reasons.Above all, we are given a picture of what it meant to be religious in nineteenth-century Ontario, and a clearer understanding of controversies still bitter today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #441097 in Books
• Published on: 1988-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 291 pages