Perhaps the most important act of Mr. Gamble's political life, was the part he took in the organization of the British American League in 1849. Into that movement he threw all his energies, and the ultimate realization of its views affords the best proof of the correctness of his judgment and foresight. About it, however, I shall have more to say in another chapter.
Mr. Gamble, as I have said, was foremost in all public improvements. To his exertions are chiefly due the opening and construction of the Vaughan plank road, from near Weston, by St. Andrew's, to Woodbridge, Pine Grove, and Kleinburg; which gave an easy outlet to a large tract of country to the north-west of Toronto, and enabled the farmers to reach our market to their and our great mutual advantage.
He was a man who made warm friends and active enemies, being very outspoken in the expression of his opinions and feelings. But even his strongest political foes came to him in full confidence that they were certain to get justice at his hands. And occasionally his friends found out, that no inducement of personal regard could warp his judgment in any matter affecting the rights of other men. In this way he made some bitter adversaries on his own side of politics.
Among Mr. Gamble's public acts was the erection of the church at Mimico, and that at Pine Grove; in aid of which he was the chief promoter, giving freely both time and means to their completion. For years he acted as lay-reader at one or other of those churches, travelling some distance in all weathers to do so. His whole life, indeed, was spent in benefiting his neighbours in all possible ways.
He died in December, 1873, and was buried at Woodbridge.
I have mentioned that I was educated as a Swedenborgian, or rather a member of the New Jerusalem Church, as the followers of Emanuel Swedenborg prefer to be called. As a boy, I was well read in his works, and was prepared to tilt with all comers in his cause. But I grew less confident as I became more conversant with the world and with general literature. At the age of fifteen I was nominated a Sunday-school teacher in a small Swedenborgian chapel in the Waterloo road, and declined to act because the school was established with the object of converting from the religion of their parents the children of poor Roman Catholic families in that neighbourhood, which I thought an insidious, and therefore an evil mode of disseminating religious doctrine. Of course, this was a sufficiently conceited proceeding on the part of so young a theologian. But the same feeling has grown up with me in after life. I hold that Christians are ill-employed, who spend their strength in missionary attempts to change the creed of other branches of the Christian Church, while their efforts at conversion might be much better utilised in behalf of the heathen, or, what is the same thing in effect, the untaught multitudes in our midst who know nothing whatever of the teachings of the Gospel of Christ.