providing a place for their Public
Worship which may appear respectable to Their sister Church of England,
and to their fellow citizens, the Roman Catholics.
Your Majesty’s Petitioners, after
much inquiry, find that it will be extremely difficult to procure a
convenient and reputable situation on which to build their Church, and as
there is a great extent of waste ground within the walls of this City,
belonging to Your Majesty, they pray that Your Majesty will be graciously
pleased to favor them with a grant of a small spot of it in a convenient
situation for that purpose, and Your Petitioners humbly beg leave to point
out the site of the old Jesuit’s Church, as a proper place, with a small
extent around it to form an enclosure to protect the Building from injury
or insult, and they have therefore taken the liberty to annex a Plan or
Diagram of the whole of the Jesuits Garden, should any other part of it be
deemed more proper or less useful to Government.
Your Petitioners beg leave to
represent to Your Majesty that among the troops stationed from time to
time by Your Majesty to garrison the City, and particularly in the Royal
Regiment of Artillery, there are many natives of Scotland and Ireland who
desire to join with Your Petitioners in Public Worship, according to the
manner and form in which they have been educated—and Your Petitioners,
with great satisfaction, have always endeavoured to accommodate as many of
them as their present place of Public Worship permitted. But Your
Petitioners, in the Church they now propose to build, intend to allot a
considerable space for the express purpose of accommodating the Troops, as
Your Petitioners humbly beg leave to suggest that the exercises of Public
Worship are likely to be performed with most benefit, when they are
conducted in the manner, and according to the forms to which the parties
have been accustomed from their infancy, and they conceive it to be
particularly necessary in the present times, when irreligion so much
prevails, to strengthen, by every means, all those habits and customs
which attach Men to Religion, and to established forms of Worship. Your
Petitioners acknowledge the indulgence of Your Majesty’s Governors of this
Province, who have permitted them, for many years, to perform their Public
Worship in the Room appointed for holding the Courts of Justice, and they
beg leave to express their gratitude to Your Majesty for Your Majesty’s
bounty, which, by the favor of Your Majesty’s Lieutenant-Governor, His
Excellency, Sir Robert Shore Milnes, Baronet, has been lately extended to
their present Minister, of fifty pounds per annum, as a salary to assist
in supporting the respectability of their Clergyman in the Society.
Your Petitioners beg leave further
humbly to submit to Your Majesty, their hopes that Your Majesty may be
graciously pleased to favour them with a grant of a certain part or
portion of some of the reserved lots in the Townships already granted of
the waste lands of the Crown in this Province, or from any other part of
these waste lands, as to Your Majesty shall appear most proper; to be
vested in the Ministers and Church-Wardens, or the Ministers and Vestry of
the Presbyterian Church of Scotland of the City of Quebec, and their
successors-in-trust, for the purpose of raising a stipend or Salary for
the