of the knowledge you gain, or is your life closely linked with the Giver of all wisdom. How grand a life may be if it is steadily guided by God.”12
In his letters to Cody, Tommy Des Barres continued to display the supreme self-confidence that had characterized his earlier letters. In 1889 he was considering the problem of where to go after graduation from University College. Having decided not to enter Wycliffe, he chose Yale. After two years he was at Cambridge, but he did not approve of that university either: “Cambridge life is very different from Yale or Toronto life. At first I was struck with what I thought was the men’s ignorance, but afterwards found to be narrowness of vision.”13
Two years later, having survived Cambridge, Tommy decided to be ordained and to stay in England for several years. Meanwhile, a cycling trip around southern England produced more of his caustic comments. About Bishop Ryle, the great evangelical, author of Knots Untied and other works, Tommy averred, “I dare to go against the trend of popular opinion at Cambridge and say that I don’t think Ryle is very much of an intellectual heavyweight. He is vastly G. Watkin’s inferior.” About Isaac Hellmuth, who had resigned in 1878 as Bishop of Huron and settled in England, he reported, “I saw Bishop Hellmuth when I was in Bristol ... I heard him styled ‘that well-nourished old gentleman’ and I thought it a most appropriate designation.” Tommy’s remarks about evangelicals were not those of a disciple: “It is interesting to note in England the various types of Evangelical churchmen e.g. 1) the Protestant Controversialist 2) the Keswickians 3) the Mouleians 4) the Broad Evangelicals 5) the Moderate Evangelicals.”14
The year 1892–93 was an important one in Cody’s life. While finishing his course at Wycliffe, he established a connection with St. Paul’s Church on Bloor Street East, an evangelical congregation under the rectorship of T.C. Des Barres Senior. This association likely came about as a result of the influence of Tommy and also of F.H. DuVernet, one of Cody’s Wycliffe friends. DuVernet was the curate at St. Paul’s and professor of practical theology at Wycliffe.
Cody was a student assistant at St. Paul’s in 1892–93. He is mentioned in the annual Warden’s Report for 1892–93 as having participated in the work conducted in the North End Hall by Stapleton Caldecott, a prominent parishioner.15 Though not yet ordained, he preached frequently at St. Paul’s. Meanwhile he brought his undergraduate career at Wycliffe to a respectable conclusion in May of 1893, graduating with first-class honours. In the prize list for 1893 his name appears twice – as winner of the De Soyres Prize in Church History and the Macpherson Prize in Biblical Greek.16 John De Soyres, probably the donor of the history prize, wrote to Cody at the time of his graduation congratulating him on his “brilliant essay” and urging him to continue in the field of church history. “I do hope that you will not lose your grip on historical studies ... Church History is sword and shield alike for the men who are ‘Evangelical Churchmen,’ and we want you to carry truth effectively.”17 But Cody found other fields of Christian endeavour more attractive.
Cody was ordained by Bishop Sweatman at St. Alban’s Cathedral on June 4, 1893.
* Evangelicals were divided (some of them still are) by their interpretations of prophecy, especially in reference to the book of Revelation. Premillennialists look forward to the reign of Christ for a thousand years on the earth when he returns at the Second Coming, whereas the Amillennialists regard the reign of Christ as occurring in the present prior to his return. The book in question was by William Milligan, a Scottish theologian, The Resurrection of the Dead(1890).
Chapter 5
Curate and Professor, Engagement and Marriage, 1893–1899
Cody soon made his mark as a promising young clergyman. He was curate in the expanding parish of St. Paul’s, was appointed a professor of theology at Wycliffe in 1893, was valued as a trusted writer in the Evangelical Churchman, and from 1894 served as the paper’s co-editor 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