and a man‘s credit in Halifax was judged by where he sat in the Church.
Morning service at St. Matthew‘s in the period 1784 - 1857 began at 9:00 am with a recital of the bills on hand asking for remembrances in prayers. A member might ask the congregation to pray for his wife or mother or child who was ailing. Another might ask for prayers on behalf of members of the family at sea, or prayers for a son or brother gone to the United States and not heard from. As the Bible chapter was read, it was explained verse by verse, and might take the better part of an hour. Afternoon service began at 2:00 pm and it was then that matters of offence were heard. The minister would read from the pulpit charges of slander. Mrs. White might accuse Mrs. Black of spreading false rumours, and would have witnesses to back her statements. Mrs. Black, if she had any hint of such proceedings would have her own witnesses. After slander cases came cases of debt. One member would name another who owed him but would not pay. Third were charges of flirtation. A wife would charge another of flirting with her husband. Last in the list were charges of drunkenness, and these were mostly made by the minister.6
In rural parts of Nova Scotia, the public recitation of sins by the sinners themselves was a feature of some Protestant revival services into the early years of the twentieth century, and provided not only an occasion for the sinners to come clean about their transgressions and receive an assurance of pardon, but also a source of inside information for those curious about their neighbours and their doings. Such services often attracted large congregations.
The old St. Matthew’s Church burned on New Year’s day in 1857, together with many other buildings in downtown Halifax. It was rebuilt on a new site (the present one) on Barrington Street, purchased from Bishop Binney, who lived nearby on the other side of Government House. The new St. Matthew’s preserved the basic concept of the old building’s meeting house interior layout, with a central pulpit in front of one end wall with galleries around the other three sides, but on the exterior it took the form of an elegant Gothic-Revival-Style church with stucco finish and a buttressed tower surmounted by a slender spire. It was designed by Cyrus Thomas, 1833–1911, one of two architect sons of William Thomas, who designed the St. Lawrence Market and the Don Jail in Toronto. Cyrus was also the architect of the Halifax courthouse, just up the hill from St. Matthew’s, on the opposite side of St. Paul’s cemetery from the church. But the courthouse is in Classical, rather than Gothic, Style; Thomas, like Stirling and some other architects of that era, used Gothic for ecclesiastical, and Classical Style for civic and secular buildings.
Today, St. Matthew’s takes pride in being the congregation of earliest foundation in the whole of the United Church of Canada.
Chapter Three
St. Mary’s, Auburn:
Decency and Order
THE BUILDER OF ST. MARY’S Church, Auburn, Bishop Charles Inglis, was a native of Ireland who served United Church of England and Ireland parishes in Delaware and New York until his Loyalist sympathies alienated him in the United States after the American rebellion. When he arrived in Nova Scotia in 1787 as the newly consecrated first Anglican bishop in what was left of British North America, he was determined to see that everything in religion in the colony should be “done decently and in order,” as St. Paul had counselled the Corinthians (1 Cor. 14:40). St. Mary’s Church, built in 1790 in the neo-Classical Georgian Style at Auburn in the heart of the Annapolis Valley, is very much the embodiment in architecture of decency and order.
However, at the end of the eighteenth century, and for some time thereafter, the religious scene in Nova Scotia was anything but orderly, and Inglis’s “Anglican Design in Loyalist Nova Scotia” (as historian Judith Fingard calls it) fell some distance short of fulfillment.7 It was a time when life for many was harsh and primitive, and enthusiasm (the word comes from the Greek en theos: “in God”) in religion offered an excitement and release that the ordered cadences of the Anglican liturgy rather failed to provide. Nevertheless, over time decency and order made an impact, and although a majority of the colonists did not become Anglicans, their meeting houses became more and more like churches, with steeples and symbolism and eventually, in some cases, even a liturgical interior layout.
But Anglicanism itself was also subject to change, largely generated from within, in what is usually called the Tractarian Movement (from the tracts, or pamphlets, its members published to propagate their views). It began in the University of Oxford in England in 1833 with a sermon preached by the Reverend John Keble in which he argued that the established Church of England and Ireland was not a mere department of the state, but the ancient Church of the British Isles. It was a view that accorded well with the contemporary romantic fascination with the lore and legends of the Dark and Middle Ages, and the Gothic revival in architecture that accompanied it. As the nineteenth century proceeded, the Tractarian Movement produced changes not only in theology and liturgy, but also in the look of church buildings. Some of these changes can be traced in St. Mary’s Church, and are evident also in many of the churches of all denominations in Nova Scotia. Indeed, our idea today of what a church looks like has been largely shaped by Tractarian and associated influences.
Photo by Graham Tuck.
St. Mary’s Church, Auburn, 1790: exterior.
St. Mary’s Church had a steeple and a liturgical layout inside from the start — although the interior today differs from that of 1790. The chancel then was shorter, consisting of little more than a small railed-in sanctuary accommodating only the holy table, or altar, and a pair of chairs set below a large Palladian-style window in the east wall. In front of it was a three-decker pulpit, perhaps placed in the centre in front of the altar, but possibly on one side under the chancel arch. The parish clerk, who led the responses of the congregation, many of whom would not have been able to read, occupied the desk at the lowest level of the pulpit, while the minister sat above him to recite the divine office and read the lessons. The third level towered over them both, and was topped by a sounding board. It was occupied by the preacher during the sermon, which could go on for a long time. Many pulpits had an hourglass, which enabled the preacher to gauge the length of his oration, and he might turn it over once or twice in the course of his delivery if he was particularly long-winded. One of the nineteenth century rectors of St. Mary’s, the Reverend Richard Avery, whose thirty-three year incumbency, from 1852 to 1887, is the longest in the history of the parish, is recorded as always writing out his sermons in full “to make sure against saying anything in preaching that was not entirely correct” — yet it was he who, in 1856, took the three-decker pulpit apart, separating the clerk’s desk from the rest of the structure.8 This was the first impact the Tractarian Movement had on St. Mary’s, for one of the goals of the Tractarians was to restore an even balance between Word and Sacrament in Anglican churches. Pulpit and lectern were no longer to dominate the altar, or preaching to overshadow the Holy Communion, as in the Georgian era with its enormous pulpits and celebrations of the Sacrament only once a quarter. Decency and order in Anglican worship now had to make room for the numinous as well. It was a shift that would have a profound effect on the architecture and appearance of churches.
Photo by Graham Tuck.
St. Mary’s Church, Auburn: interior. The panels on the end wall of the nave are of the Coat of Arms of the Diocese of Nova Scotia (left side) and King George III (right side), and are said to have been painted by Bishop Charles Inglis.
The next things to go at St. Mary’s were the box pews. The church was full of them, up a step from the floor of the alley that ran down the centre of the nave. Their sides were so high that when the worshippers sat down they could not see one another, and were visible only to the parson and the
