In 1807 at evangelical Princeton, lay status signalled nothing about social out-look or attitudes towards democratic procedure. In that place and moment it was as easy for the layman Elias Boudinot to enforce social stratification and deference to a prescribed structure of authority as it once had been for Christian clerics throughout the European world. The next incident concerns two of Ontario’s great religious leaders of the nineteenth century – the Methodist Egerton Ryerson (1803–82) and the Anglican John Strachan (1778–1867). Strachan, who eventually became the