Cody had friendly relations with Langtry, whose parish, St. Luke’s, adjoined St. Paul’s. Cody and Canon Baldwin, another evangelical, were pallbearers at Langtry’s funeral.
T.C. Des Barres, Cody’s old rector, died on September 2, 1907, four months after his formal retirement from St. Paul’s. He had not been able to attend Cody’s induction in May of that year. Cody later referred to him as “one of the most saintly characters I have ever known.” In the 1890s he had exercised an important influence on Cody, and to the end he was a sympathetic supporter. Cody took his funeral and preached the funeral sermon. His notes on the sermon might well have applied to Cody himself. He stressed Des Barres’s long ministry, his friendship with leading evangelicals, and the fact that he was a faithful pastor, a diligent student of the Scriptures, and one who declared “the whole counsel of God” in regard to the Atonement, the New Birth, the Holy Spirit and Christ’s Second Advent.5
Cody’s talents as a mediator were enlisted at Wycliffe and Havergal. Miss Knox was again threatening to resign, apparently because of a difference of opinion between herself and S.H. Blake, the chairman of the board. She wrote to Cody, giving him a free hand in the matter: “Do not trouble to answer this, make any moves you like or none. I am ready to run the school on the lines which I believe to be best for it or to go as you and the Directors will.” Cody seems to have resolved the difficulty, since Miss Knox remained as headmistress and wrote in October expressing her gratitude: “It’s good as one’s work goes on to have behind it some of the Trust which makes life worth living.”6
Another problem at Wycliffe was more difficult. C.V. Pilcher, a descendent of the Venns, a famous evangelical family, had been appointed to assist Cody in his courses and to teach Greek New Testament. Like other young university professors, fresh out of college, he was a fine scholar but had difficulty in communicating his ideas to his students, particularly the weaker ones. There were rumblings of discontent among the students in 1907, and Cody, who defended Pilcher, had conferences with Principal O’Meara and also with Pilcher. The crisis was apparently resolved, but a year later, in March 1908, a committee of the student body presented a petition demanding that Pilcher’s appointment, a short-term one, should not be renewed. They maintained that as a classical scholar he had “undoubted ability,” but that as a lecturer he was “an absolute failure.”7 In spite of his efforts, Cody failed to save his colleague this time. Pilcher retired, officially for reasons of ill health. He returned to the Wycliffe staff in 1916 and became a respected Old Testament scholar. Later he served as Suffragan Bishop of Sydney in Australia.
In the early years of the century, Cody became increasingly involved in the affairs of the Anglican Church in Canada as a whole. It was a period in which the church continued to progress toward a position of autonomy within the Anglican communion. Formation of the General Synod in 1893 had been an important landmark in the emergence of Canadian autonomy, and the church continued to progress through a process marked by successive General Synods in 1896, 1902, 1905, and 1908. The Canadian church produced a hymn book in 1908, “The Book of Common Praise,” and made progress toward the adoption of a Canadian prayer book.
These developments occurred against a background of continuing controversy in the Christian world over evolution, higher criticism, and increasing secularism. The Canadian Churchman and its correspondents showed grave concern that the orthodox position of the church and its clergy should not be destroyed. “The tone of much of the current thought of the present day is either openly hostile or offensively patronizing to the Christian religion,” complained an editorial in 1907. “It is thought by many that science and criticism have undermined the foundations of the Christian Creed. For this reason Christian journals and Christian teachers should show from time to time the strength of the Christian Cause.” The Churchman insisted that clergy whose faith in the traditional beliefs of the church had been undermined by the new intellectual movements should not continue to unsettle their congregations but should withdraw from the ministry.8
One notable indication of Christian concern over challenges to the faith was provided by three Anglican bishops in their charges to their synods in June of 1906. Ontario had recently published a high-school geography textbook, and the bishops – Charles Hamilton of Ottawa, W.L. Mills of Ontario, and Arthur Sweatman of Toronto – were concerned with its account of the origins of the earth. Hamilton spoke for much contemporary Anglicanism: “Without at all entering into the discussion of how far the theory of evolution – for it is only a theory – may be true, while it harmonizes with the fundamental laws of human progress, we can all understand its dangerous character when it presumes to tell us that the universe, and this world as part of it, were not the work of a Supreme Being, but the product on the contrary, of chance or accident.”9
But the church was already divided over the issue. Some of the Churchman’s correspondents applauded the bishop, but others were more dubious. Herbert Symonds, Cody’s Montreal friend, had a more avant garde outlook and insisted that one could believe in evolution and still be a Christian: “It is tacitly admitted everywhere that a clergyman can be an Evolutionist without forfeiting his reputation of orthodoxy.” “Spectator,” the regular columnist, was critical of the bishops, asserting that the whole question was too deep for synods to consider.10
Controversies over biblical criticism and evolution tended to draw Anglican high churchmen and evangelicals closer together. The British evangelicals might object to Dr. Pusey’s Tractarianism but they liked his conservative views on the Bible. It was probably John Langtry’s conservative attitude to Scripture that attracted an evangelical like Bishop Carmichael. But as the Toronto episcopal election of 1909 was soon to demonstrate, the older rivalries between high churchmen and evangelicals had by no means disappeared. It was in this situation of challenge and response that Anglican theologians considered the adoption of a Canadian hymn book and a Canadian prayer book.
The movement towards a hymn book began in a formal way when Matthew Wilson, an evangelical from Chatham, Ontario, moved a resolution in the Huron Synod that favoured a new hymn book. Later, in 1896, he got his high church friend John Langtry to present the resolution at the General Synod in Winnipeg, thus bringing the proposal for a hymn book formally before the church. The matter was considered at the General Synods of 1905 at Quebec and 1908 in Ottawa. A committee was set up under the chairmanship of James Edward Jones, a Toronto magistrate and the descendant of a noted clerical family.11 Jones was the strongest spirit behind the movement, and in 1908 the committee secured the permission of General Synod to use the draft hymn book in church services.
To some extent the hymn book movement focused the struggle between the two wings of the church. C.H.P. Owen deplored the influence of evangelical and other conservative elements in the church: “Of course there will be some who will continue to use Moody and Sankey or Ancient and Modern [a British book] as better suited to their tastes than any other.” A.H.R., more evangelical, hoped that some of the Moody and Sankey hymns would be included, particularly in the children’s section.12
Cody played an active part in the hymn book movement. He recorded in his diary the sessions on the hymn book at Quebec on September 11 and 12, 1905. In 1908 he was consulted on the issue by Bishop David Williams of Huron, who said that Jones would like to get the book in print as soon as possible.
Cody was regarded by the evangelicals as their principal spokesman in regard to the hymn book. Before the General Synod of 1908 he received some significant letters. The evangelicals objected to three hymns by St. Thomas Aquinas and one by Canon William Bright (of Keble College, Oxford) which they regarded as suggesting the doctrine of transubstantiation. S.H. Blake and W.J. Armitage were particularly determined to remove these hymns. Dyson Hague, who was later regarded as a truculent evangelical, favoured more conciliatory tactics. He wrote to Cody asking him to intervene personally with such high church leaders as Canon F.G. Scott and Bishop A.H. Dunn of Quebec: “Tell them frankly that as a matter of majority the evangelical objection will probably not carry and that the only way in which it can be done properly is for the sake of your brethren and the conscience of the brethren and the peace of the church.” He hoped that Armitage and Blake would not persist “in their policy of extermination.”13
Cody accepted Hague’s advice and had