A most favoured nation: The Bible in late nineteenth-century Canadian public life.

Abstract

While it is generally acknowledged that the Bible's influence in Canadian history, as in all Western societies, has been significant, this thesis is the first extended study of the Bible's place in Canadian public life. Drawing on a wide range of printed primary sources, this thesis examines the way the Bible and biblical rhetoric were employed by public figures in Canada in the late nineteenth century. The majority of the figures whose rhetoric and writing is studied here were nationalists interested in defining their nation. This study's most basic conclusion is that the Bible did indeed inform the way English- and French-speaking Canadians spoke about their country in the late nineteenth century. A second conclusion is that Protestant Canadians who perceived French Quebec as a Bible-free zone were mistaken. French Canadian Catholics certainly did not read the Bible independently the way Protestants did, but the Scriptures were available even to illiterate French Canadians---via paintings, sculptures, iconography, and sermons. French Canada's "providential missions"---the belief that the French Canadians were a divinely chosen people in the New World---was frequently expressed in explicitly biblical terms. Protestants who thought Quebec's French-speaking Catholics were totally ignorant of the Scriptures were wrong. A third conclusion of this study is that, by virtue of their eagerness to attach biblical language to mundane projects, Canada's Protestants contributed to the creation of an intellectual atmosphere in which the Scriptures could be handled casually. Protestant biblicism could not but often render the Scriptures trivial. Finally, this thesis's fourth conclusion is that, according to the terms current in late nineteenth-century Canada, Quebec's catholic culture appears to have been somewhat more "biblical," if less biblicistic, than English-speaking Canadian culture.