Churches of Nova Scotia. Robert Tuck
North America . . . ”
As the years passed, and the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, St. Paul’s received the usual maintenance required by a wooden building in an exposed position in a harsh climate. The original imitation quoins around the windows were replaced by simpler surrounds, and those on the corners of the building by the wide pilasters common in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century wooden buildings in the Maritime provinces. The building was painted from time to time, usually in an off-white or cream colour, later “stone colour” or grey. The earliest photograph of St. Paul’s, made in 1853, suggests that it was at that time grey with white trim.
The first major change in the building came in 1812, when a large vestibule, or narthex, flanked by two vestries was constructed on the elevation facing the Parade. The old steeple, which had become dilapidated, was taken down, and a replica erected on the new extension. In the early years of the nineteenth century there was an open gallery, rather like a veranda, on the south end elevation below the Palladian window that linked the two exterior doors. This was a curious structure, the appearance of which seems never to have been recorded in any visual form. It appears to have been used to stage entertainments such as boxing matches!
In 1868 the church was enlarged by the addition of aisles, or wings, on the east and west sides of the nave, providing seating for an additional two hundred persons and increasing the width of the building from fifty-six to eighty feet. The old lower ranges of windows were discarded, and new, two-light, sashed, Romanesque-Style windows with rounded heads were installed. This led to the replacement the next year of the old upper range of windows by new ones made in similar style to those below, but with a roundel set at the top between the two vertical lights.
Four years later, a chancel twenty-eight feet deep with flanking vestries was built on the southern end of the church. The old Palladian window was replaced by a massive three-light Romanesque-Style window that incorporated two roundels with quatrefoil tracery in its head. All the detailing was derived from Classical originals, but the spirit of the changes was Gothic Revival, which by the 1860s had become the dominant architectural idiom in the Anglo-Saxon world. St. Paul’s, as originally built, had closely resembled St. Peter’s, Vere Street, on the outside; but now it looked very little like St. Peter’s even in its exterior. Traces of its character as an eighteenth-century Georgian building survived in spots, but now, for the most part, St. Paul’s had been transformed into a Victorian building, both inside and out, with Italianate and Gothic-Revival influences evident in its new chancel layout, furniture, and fenestration.
This enlargement of the building, and its updating, took place shortly after the fourth Bishop of Nova Scotia, Hibbert Binney, had moved his episcopal chair from St. Paul’s in 1864 to St. Luke’s, a Gothic-Revival-style wooden building that stood on Morris Street in the south end of the city, which now became the diocesan pro-cathedral. Binney was a Tractarian, an advocate of the Catholic Revival in the Anglican Church, and, as such, he was regarded with suspicion by more Protestant-minded Anglicans. When he wanted to place a credence table in the sanctuary at St. Paul’s on which to place the Eucharistic bread and wine until it should be needed on the holy table for consecration as the Body and Blood of Christ, there was an uproar when his request was refused. The bishop moved his chair out of St. Paul’s, which then reverted to its original status as a parish church, to St. Luke’s.
An earlier dispute was more serious. When Bishop Charles Inglis died, aged eighty-one, in 1816, the diocese of Nova Scotia had been run for some time by his son, the Reverend John Inglis, rector of St. Mary’s Church, Aylesford, as his father’s commissary. In those days, and for many more to come, no provision was made for clergy pensions, and in consequence, the clergy seldom retired. In 1808, and again in 1812, Charles had attempted to get the British government to authorize John’s consecration as his suffragan, or as coadjutor bishop, but without success. After Bishop Charles was laid to rest under St. Paul’s Church, John sailed for England, expecting that he might return as bishop; but on the same ship, unknown to John, was a memorandum signed by some of the leading citizens of Halifax requesting that the rector of St. Paul’s, the Reverend Robert Stanser, be consecrated bishop of Nova Scotia. So it was that John Inglis returned to Nova Scotia not as bishop, but as rector of St. Paul’s, with Stanser now his bishop in the place of his late father. But Stanser returned to England within two years, where he continued to draw his salary in absentia for eight more years, while John Inglis performed as commissary for Stanser, as he had for his aged father. Stanser was eventually persuaded to resign by the promise of a pension, and John Inglis was at last consecrated bishop of Nova Scotia by the archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace Chapel on Palm Sunday, 1825.
Photo by Graham Tuck
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, 1750: exterior from The Grand Parade.
Photo by Graham Tuck
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax: interior.
This meant, of course, that a new rector would have to be found for St. Paul’s. John Inglis had left the parish in charge of his curate, the Reverend John Thomas Twining. As soon as word reached Halifax that John Inglis was to be the new bishop, Twining asked the churchwardens to call a meeting to recommend his appointment to the “highly respectable and responsible position” of rector of St. Paul’s.4 This they did; but not long afterwards they received a letter from John Inglis telling them that the appointment lay with the Crown rather than with the parishioners, and that the Reverend Robert Willis of Saint John, New Brunswick, not Mr. Twining, had been appointed rector of St. Paul’s. Push came to shove in what was afterwards called the Great Disruption, and the churchwardens locked the church against Mr. Willis, whose induction, in consequence, took place outside the building. However, under the threat of legal action from the colonial secretary, a part of the congregation, including some leading families, withdrew from St. Paul’s. They worshipped for a while in rented premises under Mr. Twining’s leadership, and then he withdrew, having been offered an appointment as garrison chaplain. Some of them opted to attend St. George’s Church on Brunswick Street, and the remaining dissidents, unable to find another Anglican priest who would minister to them, purchased a chapel on Granville Street, and became Baptists. Their story is continued elsewhere in this book.
Chapter Two
St. Matthew’s, Halifax:
Mather Church?
WHEN HALIFAX WAS FOUNDED IN 1749, it was peopled mostly with individuals rounded up in the poorer parts of London and shipped overseas to Nova Scotia. Within a very few years, many of them had perished from the cold, died in epidemics, or moved away. Their places were largely taken by a sharper and hardier sort of person from the Thirteen Colonies to the south, then still British subjects, attracted by the opportunities offered by the development taking place in Nova Scotia. Like the New England planters, who a little later on were settled on the lands from which the Acadians were expelled in 1755, they were, in religion, mostly dissenters from the established church of England, having learned their religion in Puritan congregations back home in New England. Before the end of 1749, Governor Cornwallis, in response to a request from the dissenters, gave four prime lots at the corner of Hollis and Prince streets that had been forfeited by their original proprietors (by reason of their failure to erect houses on them) as the site for a dissenters’ chapel. Its construction began in 1753, and in 1754 the Governor’s Council granted it £400. It was ready for use before the end of that year, and became known as Mather’s Church.
But who was Mather? No one knows for sure. Thomas Raddall suggested that the chapel was named after Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan Divine, 1663–1728, famous for having presided at the celebrated witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts — although he had been dead for a generation. Until their own building was ready, the dissenters used St. Paul’s Church on the Grand Parade Sunday afternoons, their congregation consisting largely of the same persons who had already spent up to three hours at the Book of Common Prayer service of Morning Prayer and sermon at St. Paul’s. The