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 others, his old high school principal, Bryant. According to W.J. Armitage, a promoter of Ridley, Miller had watched Cody’s career through university and “had listened to J.E. Bryant ... rhapsodize on the wonders of his mind as it developed in school life.” There was another candidate for the classics position, Stephen Leacock, but his qualifications were not as strong as Cody’s. Leacock’s rueful account, written years later, describes Cody as “a blue-eyed, handsome young man with a squared jaw which correctly reflected his firmness, though he was never to be unreasonably opinioned.”3
Cody was a popular teacher at Ridley. His friendly relations with the boys are reflected in a letter from an old student, Walter Caldecott, written after Cody had left Ridley in order to train for the Anglican ministry:
Poor old Ridley, the football from all accounts must be weak, when such as Uniacke, Cartwright Major could get on, why honestly they hardly crawled into the II last year, I should think it hard on Mr. MacLean [the English master] and Perry to play with such a team. I have heard from Cam Cartwright, his health is good, but he says that Mr. White is not nearly so nice as you were when you tried to drill Latin into our dull Heads.
I hope you may still be at St. Paul’s when I return, it seems natural to listen to you, like old times. Do you remember the “Top Hat” supper? I’d give $5 to be at one now, although our songs were never in tune (especially when Thompson was there and Lee) still I think we all enjoyed ourselves. And perhaps you remember last Easter when the “Wing” came to attack the “main.” We told them (the wing) that why they never arrived on the scene was because, they went and knocked at your door and asked to be sent back. I made the charge against Billy Evans. (I didn’t go in the wing for a while after.)
I really thought that Mr. Williams [the mathematics master] had designs on my life and if I had not been sleeping the sleep of the just I should have been a tender victim to Cruel fate, fortunately I am a heavy sleeper, as my snores must have assured him of my genuine sleep.4
The Ridley boys were probably not quite so hearty nor so innocent as they appear in Caldecott’s letter, but it does bear out Leacock’s assertion that Cody “had no pretensions and even though he had little athletic ability, the boys liked and respected him.”5 Cody’s stint at Ridley was the beginning of his long and friendly association with the school. He was a member of the Ridley board until his death.
Cody likely decided to enter the Anglican ministry during his undergraduate career when he had already come under Sheraton’s influence. He had been contemplating the ministry since his time with Hincks in Galt, but Sheraton and the Des Barres – Senior and Junior – probably were the final influences. He registered at Wycliffe in 1890, but remained at Ridley for another two years. He took a summer course in Hebrew at Chautauqua, N.Y., in 1890, apparently in preparation for his divinity program. He may also have done some work at Wycliffe during vacations, and while at Ridley he did a good deal of preaching in the college chapel and in churches in the St. Catharines area.
The course at Wycliffe that preceded ordination normally took three years. Cody managed to complete it by the spring of 1893, although he was in residence for only a year, 1892–93. When he registered at Wycliffe in 1890 the college had been in operation for thirteen years. By that time it had produced some sixty graduates and was about to move into its new building on Hoskin Avenue, north of the site of the present Hart House. The faculty was still small. In 1885 it consisted of Sheraton, three young Wycliffe graduates (Edwin Daniel, George Wrong, and F.H. DuVernet), two city clergymen (S.J. Boddy and Septimus Jones), and a professor from University College, J.M. Hirschfelder, who taught Hebrew. The course was similar to that of other evangelical Anglican colleges then and for a long time afterwards. The distinctive feature was tremendous emphasis on Bible study and on the theology of the Protestant Reformation. The core of the program was Old Testament and New Testament studies and a number of professional courses such as Apologetics (the defence of the truth), Systematic Theology (an organized presentation of the Christian faith), Homiletics (the organization and preaching of sermons), and Liturgies (the study of the Prayer Book).
The program was based on a firm and precise seven-point statement of principles, set forth at the outset of Wycliffe’s history and substantially restated in subsequent Wycliffe calendars. The first two indicate their tenor: “(1) The
