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Chapter 7

Cody’s Friends, 1900–1905

Cody’s friendships after 1900 were perhaps not so close as his earlier ones with undergraduate contemporaries like Tommy Des Barres and F.J. Steen. Because of his liberal views on doctrine, Steen had engaged in a struggle with Archbishop Bond. He had expressed bitterness at his suspension from active work at Montreal Diocesan, a theological college, and in the Diocese of Montreal (“I was being judged on a question of apologetics by men who really know nothing of the subject beyond Paley”) but rejoiced in his reinstatement (“I withdrew nothing and recanted nothing”).¹ He died suddenly at the end of 1902. Tommy Des Barres was in England for a long time. Cody does not seem to have kept up the connection, although he and Florence visited him in the early 1930s.

Some of Cody’s friends were older men who had been his counsellors. Bryant, his old school principal in Galt and afterwards his friend in Toronto, maintained his interest in Cody. In 1902 he recommended Cody for the rectorship of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Morristown, New Jersey. Cody of course was not interested in leaving St. Paul’s. It was probably through Cody’s influence that Bryant’s publishing firm was for a time printer of the Evangelical Churchman.

Sheraton, probably the dominant influence in Cody’s theological life, continued to express his affection and encouragement. He had come to rely heavily on Cody for support in the difficulties at Wycliffe. In his letters to Cody, Sheraton was almost excessively warm in his expressions of gratitude. He described Cody as “everything to me in friendship and in work – my right hand” and “my best beloved friend and strong fellow worker.” Inviting Cody to give the Convocation Address at Wycliffe in 1905, he concluded, “No one can do it so effectively as you. In fact, I would like to have you always but I suppose that would not be practicable.”²

S.H. Blake was Cody’s principal counsellor and loyal friend at St. Paul’s, until Blake’s death in 1914. Blake was 65 in 1900 and he had all the confidence of an elder statesman. He was well connected (a scion of the Hume-Blake-Cronyn connection), a successful corporation lawyer, and principal leader of the evangelical party in the Diocese of Toronto. As a parishioner at St. Paul’s, he admired Cody and was anxious to keep him at St. Paul’s. His frequent letters to Cody were full of pithy comments and good advice about Wycliffe and St. Paul’s. On February 21, 1901, Blake sounded off on the powers of the laity in the church: “It seems to me that as a general rule throughout the rural parts of our country there is very little influence on the part of laity except that which arises from their position as suppliers of money.”³ On August 23, 1903, on the subject of Wycliffe, he asserted that “O’Meara [the Wycliffe financial agent] should be identified more with Wycliffe – We want him not only as a Financial, but also as one to look after and draw on young men.” Blake also wanted changes in the Wycliffe faculty, asserting “our staff is not strong enough – we know the strength of the men that are in it, but to the outside world we may appear weak.” While Blake was plentiful in the advice he offered, he was always generous in his encouragement to Cody and in his financial support of Wycliffe and St. Paul’s.

Another congenial associate was Archbishop S.P. Matheson of Rupert’s Land, who usually stayed with the Codys when he was in Toronto. He was fond of Maurice, Cody’s young son (born in 1897), and seems to have been on kidding terms with him. In a letter of 1907, written when he was en route to Winnipeg, Matheson instructed Cody, “Tell Maurice that we had snow on the ground from North Bay up to near Kenora ... but that was in Ontario. As soon as we came near to ‘the Banana Belt’ of Manitoba it was, of course, lovely.”⁴

Matheson made a confidant of Cody. For instance, prior to his election as archbishop in 1904, he wrote Cody at some length of his embarrassment at the bad feeling between himself and a rival candidate. He often consulted Cody about appointments in his diocese. A keen evangelical, he was anxious to secure Wycliffe men for Rupert’s Land: “Oh if I could only get ten good earnest evangelical young men this spring [1906], how I would thank God! It is heart breaking to see these parishes vacant and our Church people wandering to other bodies. I am praying that Wycliffe may be able to help us.”⁵

Ellen Knox, the principal of Havergal, was immensely loyal to Cody. George Wrong wrote after her death that she “had strong opinions 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