Time & Perspective Quote by John Strachan

Power, in Strachan's telling, looks like a meeting minute elevated into destiny. The sentence is basically clerical bookkeeping dressed up as providence: a “general meeting,” a presiding “his Lordship,” and suddenly the moment becomes “an era.” That inflation is the point. Strachan is not merely recording who chaired the room in 1820; he is consecrating hierarchy as history.

The key move is his casual insistence that this “may well be considered” epochal. It reads modest, almost deferential, but it’s a soft command: any reasonable reader should agree. “His Lordship” is left unnamed because the title does the work; the person matters less than the fact of episcopal authority taking the chair. In a colonial church trying to define itself, the presence of a high-ranking Anglican figure signals legitimacy, continuity, and discipline - the sense that Upper Canada’s church is not a frontier improvisation but an extension of an established order.

The subtext is politics by other means. In early 19th-century Upper Canada, Anglicanism was intertwined with governance, education, land, and elite formation. By framing this corporate meeting as an “era,” Strachan smuggles in a claim about who should steer the colony’s moral and institutional future. It’s a line aimed at consolidating status: the Church’s story is told as the story of its leaders, and leadership is presented not as contested power but as natural succession. Even the word “Corporation” hints at structure, property, and permanence - the Church as an administrative engine, not just a spiritual community.