with Sheraton.
In remaining at St. Paul’s after his ordination, he was carrying out what became one of Wycliffe’s traditional practices – namely, having its students serve as lay assistants in city churches with the idea that they would continue in these same churches after ordination. Thus Cody began a connection with St. Paul’s that was to last for the next thirty-nine years, but it took him seven years to achieve full control of the parish and fourteen to achieve the title of rector. In 1893–99 he was theoretically only Des Barres’s curate, but Des Barres was getting on in years. In 1899 he retired from active participation in the work of the parish, although he retained the title of rector until 1907.
Des Barres, like Sheraton, was a Maritimer, a graduate of King’s College, Nova Scotia. He had seen service in the Diocese of Huron before coming to St. Paul’s about 1878. Cody’s relations with Des Barres were cordial, but the two did not achieve the mutual affection Cody and Sheraton developed during the 1890s and beyond. Cody had a great deal of respect for Des Barres.
Cody was not very sympathetic with Des Barres’s views on prophecy. Unlike modern Anglican evangelicals, Des Barres was a premillennialist. At a conference on prophecy in 1885 at the Queen’s Royal Hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the paper he presented on “The Second Coming of Christ” went down the line with the premillennialists.1
Cody was already developing as a fine preacher. Preaching was destined to be the central and dominant feature of his entire career in the Church. He was never a prolific writer, instead putting his effort into communication through the spoken word. Mostly he spoke from notes (written in a very small hand on a few pieces of paper). In this period his sermons were still a bit academic and high-toned. A.T. Hunter, who had heard a sermon on Balaam on April 15, 1894, objected to long words such as “monotonous” and “potentiality” and to several abstruse or classical terms. “I don’t know what chance of promotion a little mother English would mar in your profession, but were I to preach, meaning to touch men’s hearts, then I should get down to hard earth and stay down.”2
Cody stuck to the great themes of the Christian religion3 – the sovereignty of God, human sinfulness, and salvation through faith. The character of his early preaching is indicated by a survey of his sermon notes. On the Sunday following his ordination he preached from John 14:6 “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” This was a straightforward exposition of the Gospel, on much the same pattern he would use throughout his active ministry.
Later, in the 1893–97 period, Cody preached on Isaiah 6:8 (“Whom shall I send ... Here am I, send me”), using Isaiah’s call as a challenge to Cody’s listeners; and 1 Thessalonians 5:8 (“But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and for an helmet, the hope of salvation”).
Always an advocate of temperance, Cody preached strong temperance sermons on the subject in this period. Though his views never changed, in his later career he modified his ideas over how far the application of the principle was politically sensible.
Cody’s Lenten sermons of 1899 and 1900 on “the Men who Killed Christ” indicate his skill as a preacher.4 The sermons on Judas, Caiaphas, Herod, Pilate, and “the people” displayed his ability to recreate the past and to analyse character. He described Caiaphas as one who saw Christ as a menace to his power and financial position and regarded Christ’s execution as a matter of political expediency; Herod as a frivolous profligate who would not have been changed by further discussion with Christ; Pilate as a man whose shallow agnosticism allowed him to permit the great injustice, the Crucifixion.
A passage from the sermon on Caiaphas conveys Cody’s style:
You see him [Caiaphas] in that dramatic moment when probably for the first time he stands face to face with Jesus. Like a consummate actor he rends his robes and feigns to be shocked by the prisoner’s blasphemy. What an unspeakably sad consummation of the long history of Israel is this whole scene! On the one side stands the representative of that priestly line which went back to Aaron, the man whose right it was to wear the turban with the golden plate inscribed Holiness to the Lord ... Every act of his priestly office pointed forward to the one who should come in the fulness of time. Over against him stood that predestined One in whom all the history of Israel found its explanation for whom ancient prophets and seers had longed, who fulfilled all the teachings of type and shadow. The High Priest of Israel confronts the Hope of Israel and delivers Him over to the death.
Cody’s sermon on the role of “the people” (Matthew 27:22–25) throws light on his political philosophy. He thought of “the people” as the essential basis for governments, but also believed they were often ignorant, could be swayed, and were very dependent on leaders. In general he disliked “demagogues.” He said that change for its own sake was not necessarily good. He appealed to men of principle to give good leadership. Individuals should stand out against the mob, since public opinion can be wrong if it is not based on principle.
The whole Lenten series was an exercise in vivid narrative, but Cody’s purpose was to apply the story to the needs of his immediate audience. He usually did this toward the end of a sermon, but in this case it was in his introduction: “And that same story is a present reality. We must judge ourselves now as before the all seeing eye of Him with whom we have to do. Ask yourselves such questions of judgment as these: am I crucifying the Son of God afresh? Would my aims and opinions bring Jesus to Calvary if He were on earth again? Would my thoughts of Him differ from those of the ordinary men of His own day? Would I be brave enough to break the bonds of tradition, and have heart enough to recognize and follow the truth?”
As a minister Cody took on a load of activity that would have worn out many men. In the same year as his appointment at St. Paul’s, he joined the staff of Wycliffe as professor in “The Literature and Exegesis of the Old Testament” and in “Ecclesiastical History”; he was also assistant chaplain at the college from July 1, 1893. He lived at Wycliffe until his marriage in 1894.
Cody was one of the three Wycliffe professors who led Anglican evangelical thinking in Toronto. The others were Sheraton and Dyson Hague. Hague, one of the younger evangelicals, was destined to have a long career at Wycliffe and in various churches in the dioceses of Ontario, Nova Scotia, Huron, and Toronto. His special field was liturgies. A very forthright, at times tactless, man, he was especially vigorous in his Protestantism. In his book The Protestantism of the Prayer Book (1890), he claimed that the Prayer Book was “the great stumbling-block in the way of Romanizers.”5
Sheraton was the dominant personality of the three. An older and more established personality than the other two, he set the tone and put forward the ideas all three proclaimed. He believed in the inspiration and authority of Scripture.6 He regarded the Bible as the result of divine and human cooperation and repudiated the idea of “errancy” except in the sense that there were imperfect manuscripts and errors in translation. He maintained that there were no “errors” in the original text.
Cody was popular as a teacher. He was a brilliant lecturer in church history and Old Testament studies (his two courses prior to 1906). When he retired from teaching in 1916, one of his students, W.T. Hallam, wrote, “As I have told you on other occasions, your Church History and Old Testament lectures gave me more help than any others.” W.C. White, another old student, asserted that he would always remember his charm of manner, his lucid expositions couched in beautiful phraseology, and the brilliancy of his mind. To be sure they were Cody’s favourite students, but their testimony, while perhaps a bit glowing, was not unmerited.7
With respect to Old Testament studies Cody could be described as a moderate conservative. This was the period when controversy raged over the authorship of the Pentateuch, Moses or the post-Babylonian writers. Hallam said that Cody was a stabilizing influence in this controversy, meaning
