SELLAR, GEORGE A. (1860-1941)

SELLAR, GEORGE A., Methodist minister, Chatham circuit, 1906-08; b. Highfield, P.E.I., 2 Jul 1860, s/o George Sellar and Mary Ann Cook; m. 1885, Annie Sharpley Johnson, sister of Hammond Johnson; d. East Florenceville, N.B., 9 Mar 1941.

Trained at Mount Allison University and ordained in 1895, George A. Sellar was the pastor of numerous Methodist and United churches in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island during a thirty-five-year career. All the while, he was a zealous temperance worker, and when stationed at Chatham from 1906 to 1908 he took a confrontational approach to persons who violated the Canada Temperance Act. Many temperance advocates preferred to avoid targeting individuals and thus had qualms about his methods. On a Sunday in June 1908 when he stepped into the pulpit as though to deliver the sermon, he announced that he was quitting as minister because of lack of support for his effort to stop the "liquor traffic" and expose the "liquor men." He then stepped down and walked out the door. The congregation voted 80-4 to ask him to reconsider, but his mind was made up, and he left shortly afterwards to take up an assignment in Prince Edward Island.

Sellar was also passionately opposed to the theater and to theater-going, which he saw as a lure of the devil. A fiery sermon which he preached in Saint John on this theme caused the Chatham World to accuse him of having "more piety t han common sense." According to the newspaper, he rested his faith on a few Biblical texts which he interpreted literally and closed his eyes to "the reality of life."

Sellar was sixty-nine years of age in 1929 when he concluded a three-year pastorate at Jacksonville, N.B., and retired. He spent most of his last twelve years at Florenceville. His only named survivor in 1941 was his wife, Annie S. Johnson.