November of 1819 was marked by an alarming natural phenomenon. On Sunday the 9th a dense black rain descended, depositing a substance which to the eye and taste resembled common soot. On the following Tuesday, after a dark morning of gloom, with the sun clouds at times greenish black, pitch black, dingy orange colour and blood red, so that some thought that the history of Pompeii or Herculaneum was to be repeated, and feared that Mount Royal, reported already to be the extinct crater of a volcano, was again in activity. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon rain fell again of the same sooty character mid fearful lightning and thunder. At 4 o’clock the summit of the steeple of Notre Dame Church was struck with lightning. The tocsin sounded a fire alarm; the steeple was on fire. The people gathered on Place d’Armes and before the conflagration was extinguished, the great cross fell with a crash, breaking into many pieces. The rain had deposited greater quantities of the sooty substance than on the Sunday preceding and “as it flowed through the streets it carried on its surface a dense foam resembling soapsuds. The evening again became darker and thus ended a day which may be classed among the _dies atri_ of Montreal.”
At this time there was a certain official society life in the city which was fostered by the young military officers from the old country, to whom, apart from their extravagances, the colony is largely indebted for its heritage of culture, literature and art. The religious situation was filled by three Catholic churches, the Notre Dame parish church, built in 1672; the Bonsecours Chapel, rebuilt in 1771, and the “Recollets,” built in 1695, and loaned at different periods to the Anglicans and Presbyterians till they had their own temples. There were two Protestant churches, the Anglican Christ Church, which was the old disused Jesuit church till 1803, but which was now in its own edifice on Notre Dame Street in 1814, and the Presbyterian or Scotch chapel on St. Gabriel’s Street, built in 1792. The religious horizon was not clear. The Catholics and Presbyterians, or non-Conformist group, both had grudges against the Anglicans, arising from the question of the clergy reserves by which, according to the Constitutional Act of 1791, the Anglicans were the established church and reserves of land were provided for their growth and expansion to the exclusion of other Protestant denominations, who resented this privilege in a new country, especially by the “Church of Scotland,” who claimed equal rights to establishment, and the Catholics who had become civilly crippled and disestablished since the conquest, when they came under the same condition of the civil disabilities meted out to the Catholics in the old country.