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religious revival, or, as Knight put it, the ‘large outpouring of the spirit’, failed to materialise. 1 Knight’s response to cholera shows that institutional churches had much invested in special displays of public worship. For the devout, divine visitations and deliverances, and the accompanying days of fasting and thanksgiving, represented opportunities for evangelism and mission. It is true that some religious groups refused to participate because they did not recognise state authority in spiritual matters. For others
changed since the nineteenth century. The role of the institutional churches and public worship was diminished. The private and personal aspects of prayer was once more emphasised, though in a nod to the ancient tradition of ‘common prayer’, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation began each silent prayer session with a short invocation, agreed on by the Commonwealth’s religious leaders. 22 This book was completed as the world struggled to a contain a Covid-19 pandemic that had killed hundreds of thousands and sent billions of
colonial territories where clergy were few the authorities had to rely on a culture of lay-led ‘informal family worship’. It has already been noted that civil officials in early nineteenth-century Quebec delivered forms of prayer to heads of families if a district had no clergyman. Here, perhaps, is evidence that the patriarchal family ‘functioned in symbiosis with the institutional church’. 40 Clergy remained important figures, however, and it was they who delivered the sermons that made sense of the causes of fasts and
worship in Canada was, for instance, much influenced by the New England tradition of seasonal fasts and thanksgivings. 43 Another significant development, one that encouraged the further proliferation of special acts of worship, was that churches increasingly took responsibility for ‘national’ worship and appointed special days and prayers on their own authority. This, the book suggests, reveals much about the public status of institutional churches in the colonies. Significance While little has been written