Charles James Stewart and the First Canadian Anglican Hymn Book

In August 1809, Bishop Jacob Mountain, first bishop of the Anglican diocese of Quebec, wrote to a friend back home in England about his first episcopal visit to the newly built church in the Seigneury of St. Armand, south of Montreal: The psalmody in this part of the world, is generally very superior to what it is in England, but here it was better than I ever heard. The singers, without any distinction of rank, (though the greater part of them were of the better class) assembled about the middle aisle; men and women, especially the latter, young; but no children. They sing in three parts, not with that vulgar twang, and discordant bawling, which are too common at home, but with a softened and chastened tone and manner, and with a perfectness of tune, and sweetness of voice, that were really surprising. They were between 50 and 60 in number. I cannot express to you the effect that this truly devotional music had upon my mind, any otherwise than by saying that if you had been with me you would have wept outright. The singing that Bishop Mountain heard was remarkable in itself, but also representative of the great changes wrought in St. Armand by its recently appointed clergyman, Charles James Stewart. In the space of less than two years, Stewart had transformed St. Armand from a floundering mission to a thriving parish of two congregations. The new church, at the eastern end of the seigneury, had been completed a few months before the bishop's visit, and the congregation that met there had grown to many times its original size. The psalm books used by the singers on the occasion of the bishop's visit had been compiled, printed, and distributed free of charge at Stewart's expense for the congregations' use the year before, and a singing master hired to prepare the singers for the episcopal visit. The book, entitled A Selection of Psalms and Hymns for the Congregation of the Church of England in St. Armand, Lower Canada [Selection], is the earliest known Anglican hymn book published in Canada. Jacob Mountain arrived in Quebec City to take up his post as first Anglican bishop of Quebec in 1793. His newly created diocese comprised all of the known territory in what are now the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, stretching along both sides of the St. Lawrence River in the east, and along the northern shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, as far as the present-day city of Windsor, just across the river from Detroit - a distance of well over a thousand miles. At that time there were in this enormous diocese a total of only nine clergy, three parishes, and four missions. Among Mountain's many struggles was the challenge of attracting missionaries to serve in the rapidly expanding colonies. By 1805, only five new missions had been established. One of these was in the southwest corner of a region known as the Eastern Townships, in the Seigneury of St. Armand, a narrow strip of land four miles deep and eighteen miles wide extending eastwards from Lake Champlain along the northern Vermont border. Because of their proximity to the American border and their relative isolation from the principal settlements along the St Laurence River to the north, the Eastern Townships had a distinctive character that affected all aspects of its religious life. For political and geographical reasons, the Townships were not settled until late in the eighteenth century. They served as hunting ground for the Abanaki people, and were not easily accessible to settlement from the north because of the extensive swampland that separated them from the St. Lawrence River. The Eastern Townships saw successive waves of immigration in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: first Americans, then Britons, then French-speaking settlers. Although the townships were not officially opened for settlement until 1 792, the first settlers began to arrive seven years earlier, when the families of twenty-eight officers who had fought on the British side during the Revolutionary War came to St. …

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