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280 11 Sacred Words, Fighting Words The Bible and National Meaning in Canada, 1860–1900 Preston Jones In 1839 Thomas Fowell Buxton argued that Britain needed to “atone” for the historic role it had played in the expansion of slavery. Around the same time John Williams, a British missionary in the South Pacific, said that Britons should plant a “tree of life” in the Pacific islands, around which civilization and commerce could entwine their tendrils. Meanwhile, Sir Charles Trevelyan wrote that teaching English to India’s Hindus and Muslims amounted to a “sacred duty.”1 These examples reveal some of the ways the language of the Bible, and ideas derived from it, was employed to different ends. In some cases these ends were manifestly noble—as in the call to atone for the sin of slavery. In other cases they were less obviously upright—as in arguments for the expansion of British commerce into the South Pacific and for English education in India. The simple point is that the conceptual world of Britain’s nineteenth-century empire, which included Canada, was infused with the language of the Bible. What is also clear is that the Bible was put to ends its original authors never could have imagined for it. Though many of them did not recognize it at the time, French- and English-speaking Canadians, or at least the intellectuals and public figures who spoke for them, drew from the same source when they sought words A more extensive treatment of the topics raised in this chapter can be found in Preston Jones, A Highly Favored Nation: The Bible and Canadian Meaning, 1860–1900 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008). 1. See the documents in Jane Samson, The British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 127, 131 and 133. to define themselves. That source was the Bible. For Protestants, generally speaking, the Bible was a text read privately at home and corporately at church. The Bible was meant to be available to everyone. Protestant Canadian identity revolved around “an open Bible” and its handmaidens, private judgment and a “free and full Gospel.”2 For Protestants, free, unobstructed access to the Bible was as much a mark of progress as railroads, steamships, and printing presses.3 For most of Canada’s French-speaking Catholics, the Bible was a text read by the priest at Mass and illustrated in stained glass windows, architecture , statuary, and iconography. At the time of the Confederation of Canada in 1867, only about half of French-Quebec’s population was literate . That percentage would rise considerably through the nineteenth century ,4 but by 1901 some 22 percent of Quebecers of school age and higher were still unable to read.5 Yet references and allusions to biblical passages and stories were everywhere. Sculptures of Saints Peter and Paul, with sacred texts in hand, emphasized their status as men of the Book.6 And statues of prominent clerics such as Abbé Pierre-Marie Mignault, missionary to the Micmacs in Halifax and curé in Chambly, Quebec, pointed to the centrality of sacred texts in Quebec’s history; statuary often depicted a minister engaged in reading and explaining, if not the Bible itself, then a religious work dependent on the Bible.7 Sacred Words, Fighting Words 281 2. Jonathan Shortt, The Gospel Banner! A Sermon Preached to the Loyal Orange Lodges, Assembled in St. John’s Church, Port Hope, July 12th, 1853 (Montreal: Wilsons and Noland, 1853), 2. 3. In The Seat of Empire (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), Charles Carleton Coffin wrote: “Railroads , steamships, school-houses, printing-presses, free platforms and pulpits, an open Bible, are the propelling forces of the nineteenth century” (231–32). Coffin was an American, but the words could easily have been written by a Protestant Canadian. 4. One reason for this in the first few decades of the century was that, generally speaking, the clergy themselves were poorly educated. As the decade wore on, however, priests played a greater role in promoting education. In his observations on life in the parish of Saint-Irénée, written in 1861–62, Gauldrée-Boilleau noted that “L’éducation n’est pas aussi avancée à Saint-Irénée qu’on serait en droit de le souhaiter. Il n’y a guère que les adolescents qui sachent lire et écrire.” But “[g]râce au zèle des curés, on a réussi à fonder dans la commune de Saint-Irénée trois-êcoles: deux...

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