STROTHARD, JAMES P. (1847-1927)

STROTHARD, JAMES P., Methodist minister, Chatham circuit, 1903-06; bap. Tadcaster, Yorkshire, England, 5 Sep 1847, s/o Joseph Strothard and Mary Calvert; m. 1874, Alice Eliza Beek, of Saint John; d. Pictou, N.S., 24 Nov 1927.

James P. Strothard was preparing to go to Africa as a missionary in 1871 when he was offered an opportunity to join the ministry in New Brunswick. He began his probationary service on the Miramichi that year as assistant to the Rev. Ingham Sutcliffe, who assigned him pastoral responsibility for the Methodists residing at Newcastle, Williamstown, English Settlement, and along the Southwest branch of the river. When he completed his assignment in July 1872 he went to Halifax, and he was ordained there in 1874.

Strothard remained in Nova Scotia until 1898 and then accepted a posting in Bermuda. Following his return in 1903 he spent three years as pastor of St Luke's Church in Chatham. In 1905 he was ridiculed by The World for preaching that the story of Jonah and the whale was literally true. "To him," stated the editorial, "science is not true science when it fails to square with scriptures, and reason is unreason when it is out of tune with revelation." The editor was roiled again the next year when he heard that Strothard had admonished his flock to shun "the godless novels of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne," and read The Pilgrim's Progress and Uncle Tom's Cabin instead.

Strothard was subsequently stationed at Moncton and on Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia circuits. He retired in Pictou in 1921. In his fifty-year ministry he occupied "some of the most important and prominent pulpits in the Maritime Provinces and Bermuda," and in the opinion of his admirers, had brought to his sermons "freshness of thought, beauty of language, and rare spiritual intensity."

Strothard and his wife, Alice E. Beek, had at least two sons, including Henry S. B. Strothard, and two daughters. Their daughter M. Josephine Strothard was a teacher until 1916, when she was appointed superintendent of the Maritime Home for Girls in Truro, N.S. As noted in the Canadian Who's Who, the work which she did at this institution led to her being named to the Order of the British Empire in 1934.