Unlike the rest of the Embro connection, Aggie favoured the Liberals. After the federal election of 1887 she wrote ruefully, “I suppose you crowed somewhat over the results of the Dominion elections. Well I am sorry to think you had cause for I thought John A. was going out, but he didn’t.”19 One cannot avoid speculation about Aggie’s attitude towards Cody. There is little in her letters to suggest that it was anything more than platonic, but even if there had been more to her regard, nothing came of it. Aggie disappeared from the Cody record after the 1880s.
Phila’s two brothers, Millwood and Elijah G., both became doctors in Illinois. Like Aggie, they kept Cody in touch with contemporary American affairs. Mill very much admired President Grover Cleveland, “the man of destiny,” and like Elijah G. thought he would secure re-election in 1888.20 He didn’t.
Letters from Tom Des Barres at the university help to round out the picture of Cody’s background in the 1880s. He wrote of the matriculation results in 1886: “no Codys ... this year.” Of a YMCA supervisor, he said, “Gale took charge of the YMCA work but has not snap enough.” He described the Bishop of Rochester as “a Moody and Sankey – Temperance man, but not much of a speaker.” He was in Nova Scotia when an episcopal election was in prospect and described one of the candidates, Archdeacon Gilpin: “He is a very advanced Ritualist, goes in for Confession and dear knows what not.”21
Some of Tom’s sly digs at Cody suggest Cody’s diligence and what Tom regarded as excessive displays of erudition. On August 4, 1887 (just before Cody’s third year), Tom speculated, “From your account of work I fancy by this time if you have not melted, you have about finished your Third Year Classics,” and on September 12, 1887, “Please spare the classics in the next [letter] or else send a key to the last as I have not yet got it all translated.”
Des Barres wrote a vivid account of a missionary conference he attended in July 1888 at D.L. Moody’s conference centre at Northfield, Massachusetts. It was attended by a large delegation of students and evangelical leaders from Canada, Great Britain, and other countries as well as the United States. Des Barres’s comments were both critical and admiring: “All the British seem nice fellows, of course somewhat distant, but still I must say I prefer them much to the Yankees whom, however, I do not dislike”; “Foreigners are numerous they have a Frenchman, a Siamese quite a number of Japanese, a few Chinese, an Arminian [sic] from Asiatic Turkey.” Des Barres was impressed by Moody: “Moody is a very remarkable man ... He has also about the biggest heart of anyone I know. His humour is irresistible. He himself speaks very little. Last night he answered questions which had been handed in to him. I haven’t laughed so much in an hour as I laughed then for a long time. But yet it was good every word of it. He can be both amusing and instructive.”22
Tom was less enamoured of Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission, being put off by his appearance and voice: “Dr. Hudson Taylor is a very short man – rather peculiar looking. He has a voice which might be called a whine in anyone else but in him could at worst, be only termed monotonous.” But Tom tried to be fair and ended by describing Taylor as a man of simple faith. There was admiration but also a suggestion of the patronizing in his final comment: “I think perhaps the chief influence he [Taylor] will exert here will be that excited by the simple purity of his character, rather [than] by anything he shall say.”
Des Barres was obviously moved by the conference, despite his air of sophistication. His comments were of some significance in Cody’s early career because they helped him to relate to the outside world of evangelical Christianity.
Chapter 4
Ridley, Wycliffe, and St. Paul’s, 1889–1893
By the end of his undergraduate career, Cody had progressed a long way towards the Anglican ministry. Starting from a Diocese of Huron and Embro background, he continued to be in contact with evangelical influences – his father, the Torrances, and his cousins, Phila and Mill Cody. As well, he had established a connection with the Wycliffe community and probably with St. Paul’s Church and its rector, T.C. Des Barres Senior (Tommy’s father).
The evangelical Anglicans were a disciplined and well-organized group of clergy and laity.1 In 1869 they had organized the Evangelical Association of the United Church of England and Ireland in the Diocese of Toronto, which was merged in 1873 with the Church Association of the Diocese of Toronto. Among the leaders of the group were S.H. Blake, a Toronto corporation lawyer and brother of Edward Blake; J. George Hodgins, deputy superintendent of education for Ontario; Dean H.J. Grasett of St. James Cathedral; and Sir Casimir Gzowski, the famous engineer. They had conducted a determined opposition to Bishop Bethune, a high church Anglican, in the 1870s. They had strengthened their position by bringing Sheraton to Toronto in 1876 as editor of the Evangelical Churchman and by establishing the Protestant Episcopal Divinity School in 1877 with Sheraton as principal. Their position was basically the theology of the Protestant Reformation and the evangelical revival – justification by faith, the authority of Scripture, and rejection of excessive ritual in church services.
Cody’s association with the evangelicals was strengthened by his appointment to the staff of Ridley College in 1889. Ridley, a boys’ school, was founded by Toronto evangelicals who formed a corporation, purchased a building in St. Catharines (formerly the Springfield Sanitarium), and opened the school in the fall of 1889.
J.O. Miller, the principal, was a Wycliffe graduate and a budding authority on Canada’s literary future. He had published an undergraduate essay in the Varsity (February 12, 1883) arguing that there was little immediate hope for the development of a distinctively Canadian literature. Like many of his evangelical friends, Miller was in the British-Canadian tradition. He thought that Canadians should try to reach a universal audience by first cultivating a taste for British and European literature.
One of Cody’s colleagues at Ridley was F.J. Steen, who taught modern languages. Steen, an old friend of Cody’s from college days, was not exactly what the Ridley corporation were looking for. He was an able scholar but an abrasive critic of what he regarded as the Anglican evangelical establishment, specifically the Evangelical Churchman in Toronto and, later, the Bishop of Montreal. Cody did not share such views, but Steen was his friend and Cody respected him.
The intentions of Ridley’s promoters are suggested by an excerpt from the first annual report of the first president, T.R. Merritt, in 1890: “We have endeavoured to carry out the object of the promoters in establishing a school under the auspices of the Church of England in Canada where sound religious training, Evangelical in character and thorough literary instruction may be obtained, combined with the best physical training.” A year later the Evangelical Churchman described Ridley as “a school for the sons of Christian parents where this effort to carry out the home training of earlier years is definitely made.”2
Cody was a candidate for the position of classics master at Ridley. His candidature was strongly supported by, among