and very real likes and dislikes but she was never bitter or petty.” Cody was one of her likes, the high church party her main dislike. Miss Knox was very anxious that Cody become president of the University of Toronto. After he failed to be appointed in 1907, she wrote, “I never liked to tell you how much I was longing it could have been you.”6 Dyson Hague, another evangelical, was a son of George Hague, also a prominent evangelical and a leading Canadian banker. Dyson Hague was eleven years older than Cody and had preceded him in University College and Wycliffe. He was a very different type from Cody. There was an astringent, hard-hitting character to his utterances, rather like that of Blake. He was notoriously tactless, but had a genius for clear-cut statements of evangelical theology. The writer recalls Hague in old age as a bearded gentleman (in a period when beards were not fashionable) with piercing eyes and a capacity for emphatic utterances. He liked and trusted Cody. His daughter, Mary, was in Cody’s confirmation class in 1903, and in a letter commending her to his care, Hague wrote, “I am sure we feel very grateful to you for all the trouble you have taken, and trust that you will have the reward of a happy consciousness of lives won, and quickened.”7
Not all of Cody’s friends were evangelicals. Indeed, he had a genius for remaining friends with men whose intellectual position he did not share. G.M. Wrong, for instance, was a close friend, although the two men could not have agreed on churchmanship. They did, however, come from similar backgrounds. Both came from rural Ontario (Wrong had been born on a farm in Elgin county). Both were graduates of University College and of Wycliffe. Both had begun their university teaching careers as lecturers at Wycliffe; Wrong had been a lecturer in history and dean at Wycliffe from 1883 to 1892. After that their paths diverged. Wrong became interested in secular history and was appointed lecturer in history and ethnology at U of T. From 1894 to 1927 he headed the Department of History. He was the real founder of the school of Canadian history that became such an important part of the Toronto contribution to historiography. After his appointment at the University of Toronto, he continued with some part-time teaching at Wycliffe until 1915 and for a time was much in the Wycliffe camp. He had married Sophia Blake, Edward Blake’s daughter, in 1886. A letter he wrote to Cody in 1903, congratulating him on a recent academic honour, suggests that he still regarded himself as an evangelical at that time: “Can anything illustrate better that victory is in the hands of men who hold our views if they only show a little tact and statesmanship. And can anything show better the utter failure of high and dry Anglicanism than the condition of its colleges now?”8 But his views and lifestyle moved away from their evangelical origins. He became merely a cultured English gentleman. His ideas on churchmanship had also changed. He became censorious of Sheraton. In 1905, when Miss Knox was asked if Wrong was likely to succeed Sheraton as principal of Wycliffe, she replied, “Hardly, I should imagine his views are broad.” As noted in Chapter 6, Wrong supported the liberal Plumptre in his struggle with Sheraton and criticized Cody for not doing more to defend Plumptre.9 Yet Wrong remained friendly with Cody and assisted from time to time in the services of St. Paul’s as late as the 1920s.
After the election of 1911 Wrong wrote Cody an amusing letter that indicated he was close enough to Cody to indulge in a little joking. Poking fun at Cody’s rigid Toryism, he professed to tell of a confused young man who was unable to decide whether the Conservatives were right in opposing Reciprocity with the United States in 1911. The young man went to hear his rector, at St. Paul’s Church, for guidance. According to Wrong, the rector “must have a stronger head than my hesitating friend for he is never in doubt as to how he should vote. Indeed it is said that he has expressed privately his conviction that the Conservatives are always right and therefore that if a Conservative black cat were standing against a Liberal Shakespeare he should vote for the black cat.”10
Another of Cody’s liberal evangelical friends was John De Soyres, the rector of St. John’s Church, Saint John, and a warm friend to Wycliffe College. He had donated the De Soyres prize in Church history Cody had won in his graduating year. De Soyres was supposed to be an evangelical, but his views on biblical criticism were scarcely in that vein. He was attracted to the moderate higher critic S.R. Driver, asserting that “Driver’s calm judicial argument should do immense good.” In 1904 De Soyres became involved in a controversy with the Montreal evangelicals Bishop Carmichael and (“the irrepressible”) Dyson Hague. De Soyres appealed to Cody for support, expressing the hope that Canadian Protestantism would not come under the tyranny of Irish rhetoric and “crass obscurantism.” He hoped that Hague and his ally Canon Troop “would work toward encouraging the devotional spirit.”11
It seems that Cody wrote back to De Soyres, explaining that at least in the Diocese of Toronto the controversy over higher criticism had to be treated with caution. De Soyres appears to have taken this for encouragement to exercise less caution in other parts of Canada: “Your present position, which rejoices me more than I can tell you, gives the right to speak, and also the responsibility. I am aware of the circumstances of Toronto, and the necessity of the utmost wisdom and tact.”12
De Soyres criticized Sheraton in an article titled “The Ethics of Religious Controversy” in the April 1905 edition of the Queens Quarterly. The main thrust was that in the controversy over biblical criticism writers on both sides should always treat their opponents with courtesy. De Soyres felt that Dr. Sheraton had not always done so. He began by praising him and then pointed out “a few inaccuracies in some of his statements.” De Soyres wrote, perhaps uneasily, to Cody, “I trust he will not be offended by the slight criticisms in details I have added to the terms of my full admiration.” Coming as it did not long after the Plumptre affair, the incident may well have provoked the principal.13
Maurice Hutton (1856–1940), the professor of classics at University College, was another friend who did not share Cody’s religious views. Cody had been a student of Hutton’s and had taught Greek for a short time in his department in 1892–93. The link between them was a love of the classics, but they did not see eye to eye in regard to Christian doctrine. The writer once heard Hutton ridiculing the doctrine of election in a speech to the Wycliffe students in the 1920s. Cody, who was a moderate Calvinist, would certainly not have approved.14
Chapter 8
The Royal Commission of 1905–1906
In October 1905 Cody was appointed to the royal commission “to enquire into and report upon the system of administering the affairs of the University of Toronto and of University College.”1 The commission, known as the Royal Commission on the University of Toronto, was to consider not only the management and government of the university and of University College (UC) but also the advisability of incorporating the School of Practical Science with the university. In addition, it was to advise on such changes as should be brought about in the relations between U of T and the federated or affiliated colleges: Victoria, Trinity, Knox, Wycliffe, and St. Michael’s.
Cody’s appointment was a signal honour for such a young man (he was only 37), but he had obvious qualifications. He was a distinguished graduate of the university, an academic in the Department of Classics with an inside knowledge of the workings of U of T, a spokesman for the Anglican constituency, and (a necessary qualification) a resident of Toronto and thus able to attend what promised to be the numerous meetings of the commission.
The commissioners, under the chairmanship of Joseph Flavelle, the well-known financier and philanthropist, were a well-balanced and impressive group. In addition to the chairman and Cody, they included Sir William Meredith, the chief justice of Ontario and chancellor of U of T; B.E. Walker, president of the Bank of Commerce; D. Bruce Macdonald, the principal of St. Andrews College; A.H.U. Colquhoun, the news editor of the Toronto News; and Goldwin Smith, the famous historian and journalist. The Commission had two businessmen, Flavelle and Walker; two academics, Cody and Macdonald; two journalists, Goldwin Smith and Colquhoun; and a leading jurist, Meredith.
The problems confronting the commission were obvious. In fact, the whole university
