_>;o PAST AM) 1'RESENT OF Callbeck, who had returned from his impris¬ onment in the spring of 1776, was adminis¬ tering the Government. A small garrison of 100 men had been enrolled to man two batteries that had been erected on the water front, and the little community was further enlarged temporarily by the officers and men of H. M. S. Hunter who wintered there and remained until November, 1778. The pres¬ ence of these soldiers and sailors, while it protected the town from pillage did not tend to elevate the morals of the o immunity. All contemporaneous evidence tells the same story; that, while the strenuous life of clear¬ ing and cultivating their farms had built up a hardy and wholesome type of manhood amongst the settlers, life in the towns, where the population was largely made up of soldiers and laborers, was characterized by intemperance and licentiousness only kept in check by stern repressive regulations rig¬ idly enforced by a military and autocratic government. It was not an inviting field of labour from the point of view of a clergyman ap¬ pointed to a beneficed parish, who is not us¬ ually fired with that splendid enthusiasm which sustains the missionary under the most untoward circumstances. Nor was the missionary spirit generally diffused amongst the holders of benefices during the reign of his most Gracious Majesty, George III . To the ordinary Briton of that day faith was a union of intellectual assent to certain doc¬ trines and obedience to regulations. Reli¬ gion had its recognized place in the so¬ cial economy and those in authority felt in duty bound to accord to it a formal recogni¬ tion. We may rest assured that in his offi¬ cial capacity as rector of the parish Mr. Des Brisay was treated with all due respect for, though the governing class permitted them¬ selves a generous latitude in the matter of morals, questions of decorum admitted of no compromise. His parishioners may have paid little heed to his admonitions if he ven¬ tured to give them any, for as a rule sermons consisted of diluted moral essays, garnished with quotations from the classics with an oc¬ casional discussion into the domain of doc¬ trinal polemics; but they attended service and listened with an outward semblance of respect. Yet, as life under all circumstances is fundamentally the same and sorrow and death everywhere call into play the deeper emotions of the human heart, it cannot be doubted that there were times when the pres¬ ence of an accredited minister of the Gospel meant much to many a poor suffering and sin-burdened mortal. The next year, 1778, the conditions if anything were worse. A detachment of Col. Hierlihy's Independent Rangers, sent by General Lord Howe , was in garrison: H. M. S. Cabot , Captain Edmund Dodd , was also stationed at Charlottetown throughout the summer and we can realize what the pres¬ ence of six hundred soldiers and a hundred or more sailors would mean in a town which did not contain one-half that number of civil¬ ians. The divine fire of faith and love which glowed in the souls of men such as John Wesley enabled them to attempt, by gentle means, to quell the riot of drunken¬ ness and debauchery which characterized the lives of such men at that time, but the standard remedy was brutal punishment as the penal code of that day amply testifies. The Rector's father arrived in the autumn of the next year, 1779, and as Lieut.-Gover- nor took over the government. Had he re¬ mained in authority he would doubtless have strengthened the Rector's hands and some¬ thing might have been done towards erecting