“While the varying opinions of a mixed religious society are scrupulously respected.... it is confidently expected that every child who attends our common schools shall learn there that he is a being who has an interest in eternity as well as in time; that he has a Father towards whom he stands in a closer and more affecting and more endearing relationship than to any earthly father, and that that Father is in heaven.”

But since the expression of these emphatic opinions the tendency of legislation in the majority of the provinces—­but not in French Canada, where the Roman Catholic clergy still largely control their own schools—­has been to encourage secular and not religious education.  It would be instructive to learn whether either morality or Christianity has been the gainer.

It is only justice to the memory of a man who died many years after he saw the full fruition of his labours to say that Upper Canada owes a debt of gratitude to the Rev. Egerton Ryerson for his services in connection with its public school system.  He was far from being a man of deep knowledge or having a capacity for expressing his views with terseness or clearness.  He had also a large fund of personal vanity which made him sometimes a busybody when inaction or silence would have been wiser for himself.  We can only explain his conduct in relation to the constitutional controversy between Lord Metcalfe and the Liberal party by the supposition that he could not resist the blandishments of that eminent nobleman, when consulted by him, but allowed his reason to be captured and then gave expression to opinions and arguments which showed that he had entirely misunderstood the seriousness of the political crisis or the sound practice of the parliamentary system which Baldwin, LaFontaine and Howe had so long laboured to establish in British North America.  The books he wrote can never be read with profit or interest.  His “History of the United Empire Loyalists” is probably the dullest book ever compiled by a Canadian, and makes us thankful that he was never able to carry out the intention he expressed in a letter to Sir Francis Hincks of writing a constitutional history of Canada.  But though he made no figure in Canadian letters, and was not always correct in his estimate of political issues, he succeeded in making for himself a reputation for public usefulness in connection with the educational system of Upper Canada far beyond that of the majority of his Canadian contemporaries.

The desire of the imperial and Canadian governments to bury in oblivion the unhappy events of 1837 and 1838 was very emphatically impressed by the concession of an amnesty in 1849 to all the persons who had been engaged in the rebellions.  In the time of Lord Metcalfe, Papineau, Nelson, and other rebels long in exile, had been allowed to return to Canada either by virtue of special pardons granted by the Crown under the great seal, or by the issue of writs of nolle