TORONTO: AN HISTORICAL SKETCH 
spacious church edifices adorn the city, which is as 
renowned for its congregations and preachers as for 
its churches. 
To the archaeologist and the lover of local his- 
tory the most interesting fane in Toronto is the 
“ Holy Trinity,” overshadowed, like its namesake in 
New York, by the stupendous erections of modern 
commercialism. For here, in the parish rectory 
on the little square, lived and wrought and wrote the 
late Dr. Henry Scadding, author of “ Toronto of 
Old,” and one of the most reverend figures in the 
early history of the city. In this place, too, wor- 
shipped the Earl of Elgin, coming from his govern- 
mental residence in Elmsley Villa, afterwards the 
seat of Knox College, and now the site of the Central 
Presbyterian Church. Another name connected with 
Holy Trinity is that of Bishop Selwyn, of New Zea- 
land, the famous missionary, whose preaching in the 
church, as well as that of Scoresby, the Arctic navi- 
gator, Dr. Scadding duly records.* Its own per- 
- petuation as a down-town mission is ensured by the 
bequest of its founders, two English sisters. Little 1846 
did these ladies, or the rector who chronicled their 
pious gift, imagine that before another generation 
had passed the sylvan parish church which they 
remembered would be surrounded, like a boulder at 
* Half a century before, General Simcoe, the founder of 
Toronto, had set up the tent of Captain Cook, the circum- 
navigator and explorer of Polynesia, near the foot of John 
Street as his summer residence. 
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