Anglicans in Canada: Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective 025202902X, 9780252029028

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Anglicans in Canada

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CONTROVERSIES AND IDENTITY

Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Alan L. Hayes

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:38.

Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

anglicans in canada

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:38.

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studies in anglican history Series Editor Peter W. Williams, Miami University A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Sponsored by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:38.

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Anglicans in Canada

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controversies and identity in historical perspective

Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Alan L. Hayes

university of illinois press urbana and chicago

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:45.

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

© 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America c 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hayes, Alan Lauffer. Anglicans in Canada : controversies and identity in historical perspective / Alan L. Hayes. p. cm. — (Studies in Anglican history) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-252-02902-x (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Anglican Church of Canada—History. 2. Canada—Church history. I. Title. II. Series. bx5610.h39 2004 283'.71—dc22 2003016347

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:51.

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

For Morar

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:51.

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:51.

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Series Editor’s Preface

Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

peter w. williams

Studies in Anglican History is a series of scholarly monographs sponsored by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church and published by the University of Illinois Press. It is intended to bring the best of contemporary international scholarship on the history of the entire Anglican Communion, including the Church of England and the Episcopal church in the United States, to a broader readership. In this volume, Alan Hayes has not only assembled an important collection of primary sources for the history of Canadian Anglicanism but has also woven them through his interpretive framework into such a history. Hayes has chosen to do this through an organizational theme that does not simply provide a chronological narrative but highlights the major themes of Canadian Anglican history by focusing each chapter on one of those themes. These themes are missionary outreach, the social role of the church in Canadian society, church governance, worship and discipline, adaptation to modernity, and gender. Although none of those themes has been confined to a single era—the first chapter, for example, deals with current controversies over Anglican missionaries’ treatment of indigenous people—the order in which they are arranged corresponds with the chronological order in which they became pressing for Canadian Anglicans. As a result, Hayes’s documentary narrative begins with the emergence of a distinctively Canadian Anglican church—albeit one strongly influenced by English, Irish, and American prototypes—and proceeds to issues of the twenty-first century involving gender and sexuality and their impact on issues such as ordination and marriage. In highlighting issues that have had an impact on all Anglicans (and, in many cases, on most Christians and those of other traditions) and what has been distinctive about the Canadian Anglican experience, Hayes has provided not only an engaging narrative of Canadian religious history but also the basis for further comparative study of the development of the Anglican tradition in both the New World and the Old.

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:51.

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:50:51.

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Contents

Preface xi Introduction

1

1. Questions about Missionary Work 11 2. Questions about the Church’s Role in Society 3. Questions about Church Governance

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82

4. Questions about Anglican Church Style 114 5. Questions about the Church in the Modern World

143

6. Questions about Gender in Anglican Life 166 Epilogue 203 Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Documents 207 Bibliographic Essay 311 Index 315

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:13.

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:13.

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Preface

Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

In the following pages I discuss six controversies that I think are central to the history of the Anglican Church in Canada. I have given one chapter to each controversy, and each chapter includes not only an historical essay but also a few essential historical documents so that readers can grasp the historical flavor of Anglican life and thought in Canada. Another historian might perhaps have chosen other documents, and I, too, would have loved to include many others. In selecting these, I have been guided by the following criteria: 1. I have generally included only documents written in Canada, or at least having a specifically Canadian connection. 2. I have preferred shorter documents so that they could be reproduced whole. 3. I have generally included only documents that illustrate the public character of Anglican Christianity in Canada, not the private lives of ordinary Anglicans, interesting and important though such documents are. 4. I have generally included only documents that were recognized as important in their own day and had direct impact on the process of the historical controversies that produced them. 5. Most of these documents are rather hard to find, except in major research libraries. 6. I have tried to represent a diversity of historical periods, themes, literary genres, theological perspectives, and geographical regions.

In most cases I have silently updated the spelling and capitalization of the documents and corrected obvious typographical errors. For the introductions, I have tried to assume that the reader will have little previous knowledge of Canadian history or Anglican history. I have freely used anachronistic terms, such as the “Anglican Church” where earlier generations would have said the “Church” or the “Episcopal Church” or the “established Church,” or the “Church of En-

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

xii

preface gland”; “Anglicans” instead of “churchmen”; “priest” instead of “clergyman”; “First Nations” (sometimes) instead of “Indians”; and so on. For the territory today known as “Canada” for the period before 1867, I have usually used “British North America” (BNA), although that term is not the precise equivalent. The word Church is capitalized when it means the Anglican Church or the Christian Church as a whole, lowercase when it means a local congregation or a church building. Sometimes I use “churches” to refer generically to Christian communions or denominations. The phrase episcopal church is capitalized when it refers to that branch of Anglicanism formed in the United States around 1787 but lowercase when it refers to any church organized around bishops. I have given dates for most Canadians named, in part to assist reference to entries in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the volumes of which are organized according to the year of death of their subjects. I hope that this book will provisionally fill the need for a short survey history of the Anglican Church of Canada until something better comes along, something that looks at social history, worship, music, art and architecture, finance, models of pastoral care, the diversity of ministry, and so on. The last survey history, and probably the only one a reader would want to consult now, is Archbishop Philip Carrington’s The Anglican Church in Canada, but that was published as long ago as 1963. Although it is readable and full of personality and has the merit of being structured as a chronological narrative, its statements of fact are not always reliable, and it focuses, in the old manner, on bishops and a few great clergy. Moreover, it downplays the conflicts that ordinary Anglicans experienced, the very realities that this book presents as being key to Anglican identity. The book has taken shape in a classroom situation. For about a quarter of a century I have taught courses to theological students on Anglicanism. Most commonly, I have taught these courses in conjunction with friends from Trinity College, Toronto—over the years, Cyril Powles, Thomas McIntire, Robert Black, and David Neelands. For the courses, we have always chosen readings from primary sources so students might hear the authentic voice of the past rather than their teachers’ interpretation of the past. I hope that a much wider audience will find the voice of the past as engaging as students usually do. It is a pleasure to record my gratitude to Wycliffe College, which gave me sabbatical leave to produce this volume; to the four persons mentioned above and others too numerous to name who have encouraged me, taught me, and brought important resources to my attention; to a number of archivists and historians, of whom I might particularly mention Mary-Anne Nicholls of the diocese of Toronto, Brian Cuthbertson of the diocese of Nova Scotia, Terry Thompson of General Synod, and Diana Coates of the diocese of Huron; to William Westfall of York University, who kindly read the typescript version of this book and offered many constructive suggestions; to Peter Williams, the

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:20.

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preface

xiii

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series editor, for his cordial support and cooperation; to the University of Illinois Press, for its courteous and efficient professionalism; to my daughters Jessica and Alexandra, for their love and patience; and, above all, to my wife, the Rev. Morar Murray-Hayes, to whom in deep gratitude I am privileged to dedicate this book.

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:20.

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:20.

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anglicans in canada

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:20.

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:20.

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Introduction

“Church membership means more to Canadians than nationality,” a University of Toronto historian said in 1976.1 While his statement would be harder to defend today than it was then, it does seem true that, historically, building Canadian churches was an important preliminary to building a Canadian nationality. For one thing, churches and churchgoers showed governments how to cooperate across provincial boundaries. For another thing, competing churches in what is now Canada sought to interpret the character of their surrounding culture, sometimes in order to challenge it, sometimes in order to shape it, and most often in order to adapt to it. The churches’ Canadianization of their inherited structures of governance and finance, patterns of ministry, styles of worship, and expressions of theology helped construct a sense of Canadian nationhood. Already by 1815, long before anyone spoke of a Canadian identity, many local Christian leaders were saying that a minister raised and trained in British North America would likely be more effective there than one imported from the Old Country. They were recognizing and validating a distinctive cultural experience. The history of the ecclesial community that is now called the Anglican Church of Canada provides a conspicuous example of the Canadianization of the Christian Church. Anglicans in Britain’s second American empire agreed in wanting their Church both to remain Anglican and to function effectively in its new setting. They only disagreed as to what was essential to Anglicanism, what needed adapting, and what adaptations to make. In consequence, the process of creating an approach to Christianity that was both recognizably Anglican and recognizably Canadian was fraught with controversy. This is a book about the controversy, and it is organized around six questions that have, in one form of words or another, dominated the discussions of Canadian Anglicans. First, how should they contribute to the expansion of the Church, both in Canada and overseas? Second, what role should the Anglican Church play

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:27.

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introduction

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in Canadian society? Third, how should the Anglican Church in Canada be governed? Fourth, what understandings and styles of worship and discipline should Canadian Anglicanism honor? Fifth, how far should the Anglican Church adapt itself to modernizing trends in Canada? And, sixth, in what situations should Canadian Anglicans take account of a person’s gender identity? The six questions have pervaded the historical records of Canadian Anglicanism. They have made their way into the public pronouncements of bishops, the journals and reports of synods, books and tracts and treatises, newspapers, private and official correspondence, personal journals and memoirs, and sermons. They have been discussed, sometimes in a reflective tone, sometimes in an impassioned tone, and sometimes in an ill-tempered tone. All religious bodies have had disagreements; probably Canadian Anglicans fight no more than others. What has principally distinguished them has been, first, their sense of the themes needing discussion, which have usually involved one or more of the six questions; second, their sense of the possible outcomes deserving consideration; and, third, their willingness to include in their conversation all those identifying themselves as Anglican. Although their discussions have sometimes divided them into hostile and defensive camps, they have also united them around a sense of common concerns. The six questions are so powerful because they concern how the Gospel of Jesus Christ should be understood. Canadian Anglicans agreed that the Gospel was vital, but they disagreed about what, exactly, it was. The six questions categorize the principal disagreements. As soon as Canadian Anglicans tried to transcend their disagreements by rallying around symbols of unity such as the Bible, the sacraments, the Book of Common Prayer, and the historic episcopate, they found themselves disagreeing about the meaning of these symbols of unity and returning to the six questions.

Periods Canadian Anglicanism, like other human phenomena, has been a perpetually changing reality. If we choose to divide its history into periods, we can be sure that the realities of the history will be far less tidy than the schema we construct. Nevertheless, the historical patterns seem to crystalize into three major periods. The first, formative, period began in 1783 when the first wave of Loyalist refugees immigrated from the United States. Although there were Anglicans and Anglican churches before the 1780s in what is now Canada, we can consider them to be part of Canadian Anglican prehistory. In this first period, and with considerable support and intervention from Great Britain, Anglicans in British North America (BNA) developed local institutions such as parishes, universities, and schools. During this period the Anglican Church had a unique legal status among colonial social and religious institutions. Its precise status varied

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from colony to colony and was always subject to multiple interpretations, but whatever exactly it was, it was unique. In that uniqueness Anglicans found both great benefits and great frustrations. As the benefits declined and the frustrations increased, Anglicans began to develop new instruments of local ecclesiastical Church government, notably diocesan synods of clergy and lay delegates that could legislate for the Church and elect bishops. The second period, nation-building, began in the 1860s. The Church of England in the dominion of Canada was now, somewhat unwillingly, a selfgoverning part of the Anglican world and more financially independent. It identified itself less as an English Church in an overseas colony, more as a Canadian Church in a Canadian context. It became a full partner with government, business, and other churches in the work of developing the Canadian nation. As with other Christian denominations, its parish churches were as much community centers as places of worship; it administered schools, hospitals, and social services on a broad scale; its leaders influenced political decision making at every level of government; and its overseas missions represented the Canadian people as much as they represented the Church. Parish churches served as neighborhood offices for world mission, community service, and the protection of public moral standards. The third period, the modern one, began in the 1960s. Canada was increasingly multicultural, and both government and business were growing shy of close ties with churches. Diocesan and national offices adopted bureaucratic structures, procedures, and standards. An intense theological ferment was transforming official norms of doctrine, mission, gender roles, education, and liturgy. Parish churches, no longer major centers in the Canadian public landscape, became associations for fellowship, liturgy, personal spirituality, and pastoral care.

Three Models of Anglican Identity In the formative period between the 1780s and the 1860s, Canadian Anglicans drew broadly from three distinct models of what an Anglican Church ought to be and do: English Anglicanism, American Anglicanism, and Irish Anglicanism. These three Anglican communities shared a very great deal, particularly before the 1830s. They worshipped according to the same (or almost the same) liturgical texts and with the same (or almost the same) plain ceremonial. They traced their heritages to the same English Reformation. Until the American Revolution they were governed by the same monarchs. They recognized the same Articles of Religion. They comprehended the same spectrum of theological schools of thought. They gave their ordinands many of the same texts to read. For current information they depended on many of the same periodicals. But their differing social contexts and their differing financial and institutional situations led them in different directions.2 Not all English Anglicans represented the

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:27.

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introduction English model, nor American Anglicans the American model, nor Irish Anglicans the Irish model. Anglicanism in each nation encompassed a wide spectrum.

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The English Model In the first decades of the formative period, the English influence on BNA was particularly strong. English colonists were, naturally, intimately familiar with English Anglicanism, and many Canadian Anglicans, especially those in positions of leadership, advocated the fullest possible reception of the English model. In England, the Church of England was established in ways defined by the constitution, statutory law, and custom.3 The monarch was the supreme governor of the Church, and Parliament was its chief legislature. Bishops, appointed by the Crown, sat in the House of Lords. The liturgy of the Church was enacted by statute and was thus under predominantly lay control. Church finance depended on tithes that were enforced by law. The Church had legal authority in many areas, its officers had coercive powers, it tried cases in its own courts of law, and it owned huge amounts of property. The Anglican parish played a central role in English community life, and its vestry administered many of the responsibilities of local government. Parishioners were entitled to the ministrations of the Church. After 1689 Christians who were not Unitarian or Roman Catholic could legally meet for worship, although they still suffered numerous disabilities and restrictions that did not begin to be repealed until 1828. The term established Church now came into common use to distinguish the Church of England from “the dissenting churches.” This nomenclature would continue in general use in BNA, especially among Anglicans, through most of the nineteenth century, and sometimes much later, even though the legal and social realities were not at all the same as in England. With religious toleration after 1689, the Church of England looked for a theory of Church establishment. Previously, the definitive statement had been that of the Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600), who put it in a famous sentence: “There is not any man of the Church of England but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any man a member of the commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England.”4 That statement no longer reflected legal fact. We might identify the new mainstream approach as that propounded by Archdeacon William Paley (1743–1805), the most influential of eighteenth-century English theologians, who argued that the purpose of the state in establishing the Church was to guarantee “a scheme of instruction” in religious knowledge, seen as an essential interest of good government. But alternative views were propounded. Further to the right (so to speak), some argued that Church establishment was essential for the consecration of government to the tasks given it by God and for showing government the moral standards by which it ought to be guided. On the left, some argued that Church

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establishment was purely a utilitarian alliance of two independent bodies. On the extreme left, although this part of the spectrum looked less extreme as the years rolled on, some argued against any Church establishment whatever.5 The English model, with its emphasis on the Church’s service to the state and to the nation, particularly influenced how the Anglican Church in Canada understood its role in society. It will be most conspicuous in the historical processes discussed in chapter 2.

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The American Model Because many came to BNA from the United States, and communications between Anglicans north and south of the border were almost always free, open, and easy, the American model also made a large impact on Canadian Anglicanism. During the colonial period there were really three American models of the social position of the Anglican Church: an established church without local bishops, as in the southern colonies; a self-supporting church among other selfsupporting churches, as in the “middle” colonies and Rhode Island; and a minority church struggling under a more or less oppressive Presbyterian or Congregationalist religious establishment, as in the northern colonies. The differences in the social position of Anglicans between, say, Virginia and Vermont were therefore quite pronounced. Nevertheless, we can make four generalizations. First, in most colonies American Anglicans composed one of many religious minorities, and despite some sharp controversies, especially among the intelligentsia, most of these groups learned to practice mutual toleration and cooperation. Even in colonies where the Church of England was established, it was expected to respect religious diversity, as John Locke (1632–1704) expressed clearly in his constitution for the Carolina Colony in 1669. Second, no Anglican bishops resided in America; therefore, unlike their English and Irish counterparts, American Anglicans were insulated from much of the politics and discipline of the home country. Third, American Anglicans learned in some measure to govern themselves at a local level, which sometimes led to healthy lay leadership and clerical collegiality and sometimes to the control of congregational affairs by colonial politicians and wealthy landowners. Fourth, by about the 1750s many (although again not all) American Anglicans identified more with America than with England. Their schools and other institutions, their theological treatises and their church news, and many of their ways of doing things were geared to the New World. As the Revolution would show, most of them felt better anchored in their new society than in the mother country. By the 1770s, most American Anglicans likely rejected the establishment model of the position of the Church in society. In the American model, Anglicans were comfortable with American values and were not agents of English values. They welcomed an ecclesiastical government “from below” and based (under God) in “the people” rather than “from above” and based in the Crown.

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:27.

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introduction On both religious and political grounds they preferred a civil structure that permitted individuals to make personal religious commitments over one that imposed uniform standards on the community. Moreover, they were content with the religious diversity that resulted from such a civil structure. The republican movement of the eighteenth century moved Americans toward their modern assumption that religion is a private and personal matter. In the wake of the Revolution, the new American states sooner or later dissolved whatever church establishments existed. The American model, with its sense of independence from the mother Church, its assumption that the Anglican Church was one denomination among many in a religiously pluralistic society, and its concern for fair representative ecclesiastical government, notably influenced Canadian Anglicans in developing synods and a constitutional episcopacy. This model will therefore be particularly conspicuous in chapter 3.

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The Irish Model The Church of Ireland had an immense influence on Canadian Anglicanism in the nineteenth century, especially in Ontario and New Brunswick.6 The Irish were the largest ethnic group in English Canada between the 1830s and the 1880s, and perhaps 60 percent of them were Protestant. Toronto, sometimes called “the Belfast of North America,” was alone among contemporary North American cities in receiving more Irish Protestant immigrants than Irish Catholic. The Orange Order, a militant association of Irish Protestants, established a “Grand Lodge” for BNA in Brockville, Upper Canada, in 1830. It exercised a considerable political influence in Victorian Canada, the more so because it welcomed non-Irish Protestants into membership as well. The name of the church to which Canadian Anglicans belonged from 1801 (when Great Britain and Ireland merged to form the United Kingdom) to 1870 (when the Church of Ireland was legally disestablished) was the “United Church of England and Ireland.” One study has shown that of ninety-one Anglican clergy in Upper Canada in 1841, thirty-one were born in Ireland; at least nineteen had studied at Trinity College, Dublin.7 During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Church of Ireland resembled the Church of England in that it was legally established, richly endowed, and directly administered by bishops appointed by the English government as part of its system of patronage. But in contrast to England, where perhaps 90 percent of the population of England was Anglican, in Ireland only about 10 percent of the population belonged to the established Church. Most of the rest of the population was composed of a disenfranchised Roman Catholic peasantry who in the early 1800s still could not vote, own property, or educate their children in Catholic schools. The Irish Church establishment was supported by tithes exacted in large part from this peasantry; after 1735, most

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introduction

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property that Anglo-Irish landlords owned was exempt. Anomalies were rampant. The parish of Kilrush, for instance, reportedly raised sufficient tithes to pay two clergy, and these two clergy served a total Protestant population of six. Moreover, the vast majority of the bishops, clergy, and laypeople of the Church of Ireland were English or Anglo-Irish, agents of the conqueror’s culture. As a result of its social position, the Church of Ireland before disestablishment had a siege mentality and resisted all accommodation to the majority of the country. In the early 1800s English Anglicans and American Anglicans usually disliked Roman Catholics, too, but in Ireland the hostility was very personal and much less compromising. Successive English governments moved toward granting civil rights to Roman Catholics in the 1820s, remitting their tithes in the 1830s, and enacting disestablishment in the 1860s. The Church of Ireland went kicking and screaming every step of the way. From the 1820s to the 1860s, it worked to proselytize and convert Roman Catholics through societies, preaching missions, and tracts and newspapers. In 1822 the process was dubbed by William Magee, the archbishop of Dublin, a “second Reformation,” but Roman Catholics viewed it as a massive assault on their religion and social identity. A Roman Catholic critic declared in 1854 that the Church of Ireland had produced “twice as many riots as conversions.”8 As one modern scholar says, “The Church of Ireland was not simply a minority church, it was one surrounded by a sea of hatred.”9 Evangelicalism was conspicuous, perhaps predominant, in the Church of Ireland by about 1850. Whether it produced the hostility to Roman Catholicism or whether the hostility to Roman Catholicism produced the evangelicalism is not easy to determine. Certainly, the two were inextricably linked in the Church of Ireland before the 1870s. Evangelicals, champions of the Scriptures, denounced the anti-Christ of Rome for teaching nonscriptural superstitions. Advocates of individual conversion, evangelicals attacked Roman Catholicism for repressing the independent judgment of the faithful. Where evangelicals aimed to prove a point of doctrine, a dependable strategy was to demonstrate that Roman Catholics denied it. Even many Church of Ireland clergy who were not evangelical displayed a similar militant energy for exposing the errors of Roman Catholics. The Irish model, with its emphasis on Scriptural truth and doctrinal purity, and with its defensive and militant quality, particularly influenced Canadian Anglicans in their discussions of church style. This model will be especially notable in chapter 4.

High Church and Low Church The terms high church and low church have changed their meanings more than once, and sometimes each has had multiple meanings. In the sense in which they

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introduction were used during the eighteenth century, they illuminate the difference between the English model of Anglicanism and the American model. The term high church came into use during the late seventeenth century as an ecclesiastical equivalent for another new word, Tory. Both words indicated that the king of England ruled by divine right, that his subjects owed him obedience as a matter of Christian obligation, that the establishment of the Church of which the king was the earthly head was critical to the English constitution, and that laws restricting non-Anglican “dissenters” should be strictly enforced. High-church Anglicans attached particular importance precisely to those points of doctrine and worship that distinguished Anglicans from non-Anglican Protestants, including the historic episcopate, set liturgical forms, and an understanding of sacraments as instruments of grace. In politics they were Tories who upheld the prerogatives of the Crown against the expanding claims of Parliament and upheld the establishment of the Church of England against growing demands for religious liberty and equality. The Tory party governed England from 1760 to 1830, years that were critical for the formation of Canadian Anglicanism. During this period, Tory and high-church views dominated English leadership circles in Church and state—that is, the class that named bishops, sponsored most colonial missionaries, and approved policy for the Anglican Church in BNA. Thus the general theory of Church establishment that I have called the “English model of Anglicanism” belonged to a high-church constellation of theological ideas. The opponents of the Tories were the Whigs. Whigs held views that were the opposite of the Tories’ on the divine right of kings, the obedience of subjects, the establishment of the Church, and the treatment of dissenters. The term low church named Anglicans with Whiggish views. Their characteristic political theory was that the people themselves had created, or contracted for, the government by which they were governed and that their government was supposed to protect their rights. This was the theory underlying the Declaration of Independence, and two-thirds of the American patriots who signed that historic document were low-church Anglican Whigs. After the American Revolution, low-church Anglicans were instrumental in constructing the new Episcopal Church according to a Whiggish, from-thebottom-up plan somewhat resembling the Constitution of the United States (although a small but articulate high-church group won a few compromises). In this plan, individual Anglicans formed parishes, parishes formed diocesan conventions, and diocesan conventions formed the national General Convention. Bishops, elected by the representatives of the people, could exercise authority only within the restrictions of a system of checks and balances. What I have called the “American model of Anglicanism” is this low-church plan, characterized by an abhorrence of Church establishment and privilege, and a commitment to popular representation in institutional structures.

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Canadian Anglicanism The ways in which Canadian Anglicans borrowed and balanced the English, American, and Irish models of Anglicanism were part of a complex and fascinating history involving a great many personalities, processes, contexts, and questions. As Canadian Anglicans sought to be faithful to God, they found themselves returning again and again to the six themes. And as they discussed those themes they found themselves returning again and again to the three models. Thus the three models were variously advocated and critiqued, tested and revised, and applied and rejected, in quite disparate contexts, as part of an ongoing historical process. None of the six questions could ever be answered definitively. In one situation, Canadian Anglicans might reach a temporary compromise on gender; in another, they might pass a short-lived resolution on church style. As circumstances changed, however, the questions had to be reopened and reframed. Those who look for Canadian Anglican identity in a clear and constant set of views or values look in vain. It can only be found in the continuities of discussions around the six persistent questions.

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Notes 1. John S. Moir, “Loyalism and the Canadian Churches,” in John S. Moir, Christianity in Canada: Historical Essays (Yorkton, S.K.: Redeemer’s Voice Press, 2002), 71–81, quotation on 81. 2. A fine book on the British church establishments is Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1801–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3. H. R. S. Ryan, The General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada: Aspects of Constitutional History, published as Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 34, no. 1 (1922): 1–146; Reginald V. Harris, An Historical Introduction to the Study of the Canon Law of the Anglican Church of Canada ([Toronto]: Commission on Canon Law, General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, 1965). 4. Richard Hooker, On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 8.i.2. The standard edition is now the Folger Library edition edited by John Booty (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1993). 5. William Paley, Moral and Political Philosophy, originally published in 1786 (London: s.n., 1823); on the right, see Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, originally published in 1790 (ed. J. C. D. Clark; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); on the left, see William Warburton, The Alliance between Church and State, originally published in 1736 (London: Printed for J. and P. Knapton, 1748); on the extreme left, see Jeremy Bentham, Church of Englandism (London: Effingham Wilson, 1818). 6. Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: Study in Rural History, 2d ed. (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1999); Donald Harman Akenson, The Church of Ireland: Ecclesiastical Reform and Revolution, 1800–1885 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); Desmond Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–1870 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1978).

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7. J. J. Talman, “Some Notes on the Clergy of the Church of England in Upper Canada prior to 1840,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3d ser., sec. 2, 32 (1938): 63–66. 8. Bowen, The Irish in Ontario, 298. 9. Akenson, The Church of Ireland, 66.

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chapter 1

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Questions about Missionary Work

From the first time a Book of Common Prayer was opened in what is now Canada, Anglicans identified their Church as a missionary organization. By this they meant that it was directed by God to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to new fields and to supply Christian ministry in situations where people lacked the means to finance it themselves. Christian mission thus had two dimensions in principle that overlapped in practice: giving Christian service and witness to non-Christians and helping new congregations as they became financially selfsupporting. At first, British North America (BNA) was a mission field of the Church of England, and throughout their history Canadian Anglicans were beneficiaries of the largesse of several English mission societies. By the 1830s their efforts to support themselves were gathering a modest measure of momentum, and they began sponsoring missions in other parts of the continent. In the 1870s they were creating whole missionary dioceses at home and were moving toward sponsoring missions overseas. By the 1940s domestic and overseas missions and Indian residential schools enjoyed prominence in Anglican periodicals, parish programming, and Church budgets at the national, regional, and local levels. In the 1970s Canadian Anglicans helped create the Partners in Mission Program (PIM) for the worldwide Anglican Communion. Being an Anglican meant being a member of a missionary church, and that meant growing with the country, bringing the Gospel to its indigenous people, and participating in the evangelization of the world. But throughout these years Canadian Anglicans disagreed about the specific objectives and strategies of mission. In their statements, debates, and writings they asked how they should contribute to the expansion of the witness and work of the Church, both in Canada and overseas. They disputed some subsidiary questions, too. To what extent, and how quickly, should the Church support its own missions without help from England? Should Canadian Anglicans in the

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anglicans in canada East help those in the West? What were the missionary needs of aboriginal people? Should other Christians, such as French Canadian Roman Catholics, be proselytized? Should Canadian Anglicans, struggling to start new churches in their own country, give energy and funds to missionary work in distant foreign lands? What exactly was the purpose of Church expansion and mission? Improving the moral and spiritual character of the world? Healing and teaching in the name of Christ? Making converts? Giving people a religious choice? The most unmistakable sign of their many disagreements about these questions was the remarkable number of Anglican mission societies operating in Canada, each with its own approach to these questions.

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Before Mission Societies The first Anglicans to worship in what is now Canada were the sailors on ships sent by the king of England to the New World, perhaps as early as 1497 when John Cabot led an expedition for King Henry VII. Sometimes naval chaplains were onboard; sometimes the ship’s captain led prayers. When in 1578 Martin Frobisher led an expedition to the bay that now bears his name, his chaplain, Robert Wolfall, used the Book of Common Prayer at a service of Holy Communion at Baffin Island. It was the first known Anglican eucharist in what is now Canadian territory.1 Early settlements, such as the unsuccessful one attempted at Newfoundland in 1583 by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, also provided for the use of the Book of Common Prayer in public worship. Later, English military garrisons sometimes had chaplains on staff, such as John Harrison at Annapolis Royal in 1710. These arrangements, so far merely temporary and provisional, expressed the intent of appropriate authorities that Anglican Christianity should accompany English explorers and settlers. This general intention was explicitly acknowledged when King Charles II directed his Council for Foreign Plantations that native Americans and African slaves should “be invited to the Christian faith.” As early garrisons and settlements grew into permanent colonies, it was obvious to English leaders that a Christian community life, a settled minister, church and school buildings, and regular services of worship would be required. The first permanent Anglican congregation of this description in what is now Canada began at St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1701. In Newfoundland at that time there were perhaps seven thousand year-round residents, with another ten thousand flooding into the bays during the summer fishing season. The missionary in charge was a priest named John Jackson. He had first visited the island in 1696 as a naval chaplain, and, with the promise of support by an English patron, returned as a parish minister, bringing his wife and eight children. Jackson’s expenses were great, and his stipend, when paid at all, was meager. Soon he was facing destitution. To his financial relief in 1703 came a newly founded English missionary organization that would prove to be the most important of

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questions about missionary work the many English missionary societies that labored in the colonies of British North America.

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The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) was, in effect, the missionary society of the Church of England, even though formally it was chartered as an independent organization.2 With its ambitious aims, large budget, effective administration, national prominence, and network of influence it demonstrated that mission was a priority for the Church of England. It was organized by a remarkable Anglican priest, scholar, teacher, and administrative genius named Thomas Bray (1656–1730). Bray’s great vision was that sound practical religion depended on sound theological learning. Indeed, that statement might almost serve as the motto of the Anglican tradition. In the manner of many English country parsons, he found time to write, and his most notable publication was a set of catechetical lectures in four volumes. It was perhaps his writing that brought him to the attention of the bishop of London. Just at this time the bishop was looking for effective ways to exercise the jurisdiction that he had recently received from the king over the English colonies. The bishop decided to appoint Bray as his official commissary or agent to the Province of Maryland in America. Visiting there in 1699, Bray was forcefully struck by the pastoral and spiritual needs of the large Anglican population. (He was also shocked by the plight of the black slaves.) He realized that the Church of England lacked the organization and resources to do effective ministry. After talking with the governor, the clergy, and others, he concluded that Anglicans in the American colonies needed the assistance of an English organization that had influence, official status, and money. He petitioned the king to incorporate such an organization and enlisted the help of his own bishop and others. On June 16, 1701, the government chartered the SPG. Its purpose was to provide “a sufficient maintenance . . . for an orthodox clergy” and make “such other provision . . . as may be necessary for the propagation of the Gospel” in colonies belonging to England.3 The Venerable Society (as it was often called) could act with authority, partly because its governing board included the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, and numerous other Church dignitaries. Moreover, kings and queens supported its fund-raising, and for many years Parliament gave it large sums of money to distribute. It recruited and oversaw pastors, teachers, and catechists; in addition, it paid salaries, built churches, gave direction to the Church of England in the overseas colonies, and advocated for the colonial Church among politicians and opinion-makers in England. During its first seventy years it took a particular interest in the “older” (thirteen) American colonies, to which it sent 309 ordained missionaries and unnumbered schoolmasters. After the Revolution, the SPG withdrew entirely from the United States and

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anglicans in canada began to focus on the newer provinces of BNA, where it had already begun to work. It wielded great influence in Canadian Anglicanism, perhaps too great, and it did many good works, perhaps too many. The first of the several hundred SPG missionaries in what is now Canada was John Jackson. In Newfoundland it also supported clergy at Bonavista, Trinity Bay, Placentia, and Harbour Grace. It began its work in Nova Scotia by appointing a schoolmaster at Annapolis in 1728. In April 1749, when the Board of Trade and Plantations decided to colonize a new naval base at Halifax, it asked the SPG for clergy and teachers, and before the end of June two SPG clergy and a schoolmaster were arriving in Halifax. One of them, William Tutty, built St. Paul’s Church, the oldest Anglican church in continuous existence in what is now Canada. Another SPG missionary ministered to French and German Protestants in Lunenburg, where he built another St. Paul’s Church, the second-oldest Anglican church in the country. SPG clergy were also active in the areas around Windsor, Cornwallis, and Fort Cumberland. In the wake of the American Revolution, English-speaking immigrants began to pour into the “second British empire” in North America, and the needs for ministry increased dramatically. The SPG reassigned many of its clergy from the thirteen older colonies and recruited new ones. Most Anglican clergy in BNA were SPG missionaries. The most common distinction between a mission and a parish was that the minister of a mission was paid by the SPG, whereas the minister of a parish was paid by the government. There were very few parishes. In 1901 a historian of the SPG tabulated all the missionary assignments up to that time. He reported that from 1703 to 1900 the SPG had sent 1,597 ordained missionaries to what is now Canada (table 1). The SPG also supported the bishops of Nova Scotia. The SPG earned a well-deserved reputation for careful organization and systematic processes. Its instructions to missionaries demonstrate its commitment to careful oversight (Document 1). Much of its administrative work—and influence—devolved on its secretary, who became a powerful force in colonial Anglicanism. He appointed clergy, monitored progress, evaluated ministries, recomTable 1. Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Missionaries to Canada, before 1900 Newfoundland, with northern Labrador Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island New Brunswick Quebec Ontario Manitoba and Northwest British Columbia Total appointments

210 268 227 312 389 202 67 1,675

Note: Numbers total more than 1,597 because of “repetitions and transfers.”

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questions about missionary work mended funding and policy, and solved problems. Unfortunately, many secretaries were naïve about the realities of a frontier ministry in a multicultural society, including the difficulties of transportation, the cultural dynamics, the political issues, and the basic problems of survival. They had no conception of the immense distances in BNA and expected their missionaries to care for huge expanses of territory. It was not until 1849 that an SPG secretary set foot on the continent, and it was not until 1901 that there was an SPG secretary who had actually been a colonial minister. Friction between SPG secretaries and colonial bishops was common. Bishops had the formal jurisdiction, but SPG secretaries had the money. Through the SPG, the Anglican Church in BNA developed a strong dependence on English wealth. In the early years, the SPG derived wealth from gifts, bequests, and investment income, and its fund-raising was assisted every three years by a well-publicized royal letter endorsing its work. In 1814 the society began receiving large annual grants from the Imperial Parliament, which previously had given small grants here and there to support clergy salaries and church construction. Parliamentary grants made a substantial difference. In 1813 the ordinary expenditures of the SPG amounted to £3,705; in 1820 they were £24,025, of which almost half came from the Parliamentary grants; and in 1830 they were £41,549, of which £15,532 was voted by Parliament. But that largesse was not secure. It came as a shock to the colonial Church when the British government decided in 1832 that the grants should be reduced to zero over the following two years. The change in policy was connected with a number of other social, political, and economic developments that will be considered in the next chapter. The colonial Church suddenly needed to find alternate sources of funding— and quickly. Clergy found their very modest stipends drastically cut, and a number suffered serious hardships. The government soon recognized that a real injustice was being done to missionaries who had come to Canada on the assurance of a steady stipend, and it agreed to continue partial funding as a transitional measure. For its part, the SPG dramatically improved its fund-raising efforts. As a result, from the 1830s to the 1860s the number of missionaries that the SPG supported actually increased, although the proportion of clergy salaries paid by the SPG declined. The policy of the SPG was to encourage the overseas dioceses to become financially self-supporting as soon as possible. Canadian Anglicans, however, were slow to shoulder their own burdens. The SPG ceased its grants to the diocese of Toronto in 1858; the diocese of Huron (except for Indian ministry) in 1881; the diocese of Montreal in 1882; the diocese of Ontario in 1884; the diocese of Columbia (that is, British Columbia) in 1882, except for a Chinese ministry in 1898 and 1899; the diocese of Quebec in 1900, except for three specific objects; and the diocese of Nova Scotia in 1901. In 1896 an undiscerning SPG secretary decided that all dioceses of Canada were now capable of supporting themselves entirely, and he announced that the

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anglicans in canada

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Venerable Society would be terminating its grants to the country in 1900. He apparently thought that the SPG was simply subsidizing established congregations; it eluded him that large numbers of immigrants were pouring into new parts of western Canada. Another wave of shock struck the Anglican Church in Canada. But the administrator retired; a more sympathetic one took his place; and an influential English bishop, visiting the prairies and British Columbia, verified the needs. The society reversed its decision, and Anglican officials in Canada breathed more easily. The SPG continued grants to the diocese of Fredericton until 1911, to the diocese of Rupert’s Land until 1918 (longer for St. John’s College), and to the diocese of Newfoundland until 1922. Even after that, funding was continued for the dioceses of Algoma, Keewatin, Saskatchewan, Qu’Appelle, Calgary, Edmonton, Cariboo, Kootenay, New Westminster, and Caledonia. By the 1930s, the continued dependence of Canadian Anglicans on the “mother country” was becoming embarrassing. Canada was certainly not a poor country after World War I, and other Anglican provinces had long since become self-supporting or nearly so. New Zealand, for example, had received its last SPG grant in 1880. The primate of the Church of England in Canada, Derwyn Owen (1876–1947), and others conferred with the SPG in 1937. They agreed to combine their efforts to raise an endowment, to be called the Sustentation Fund, which would replace the system of annual SPG grants. The outbreak of World War II, however, changed the picture. The survival of England was now in the balance, and in 1940 the mission board of the Anglican Church in Canada decided to forego all further SPG grants as of the end of the year. The SPG continued to collect money for the Sustentation Fund, but in 1947 the Canadian mission board decided to return that collection to the SPG as a gift.

The Church Missionary Society The second most important English missionary organization for Canadians, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), played a particularly important role in the Canadian West.4 It was formed in 1799 by a group of Anglican laypeople and clergy who had evangelical sympathies and found little welcome from the SPG, which was organized around high-church principles. (Among nineteenth-century Anglicans, the term evangelical connoted commitment to the theological authority of the Bible alone and stress on the personal dimension of faith and vocation. High-church Anglicans emphasized the corporate dimension of faith, which was characterized by membership in a rightly ordered episcopal church, a strong sacramental and liturgical life, respect for Church tradition as a subordinate theological authority, and deference to Church leaders.) Nevertheless, although administered by evangelicals, the CMS did not define doctrinal standards for membership. In fact, according to its authorized history in 1899, it was not until 1841 that any of its leaders publicly described it as an evangelical institution.

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questions about missionary work It was not only their theology that made evangelicals an unfashionable breed in England in 1799 but also their meddlesome, disruptive social activism, which they applied in campaigns against slavery and educational programs for the underprivileged. Moreover, the SPG and the CMS had different priorities for mission. The mandate of the SPG was to serve settlers and native people under British authority; the CMS wanted to convert “the heathen”—that is, nonChristians. The CMS was hampered by two circumstances. First, converting the heathen was seen by many, then as now, as narrow, bigoted, and imperialistic. Second, unlike the SPG, the CMS enjoyed no official sanction from the Anglican establishment. Its founders had approached the archbishop of Canterbury, hoping for his approval, but had won from him no more than a promise not to oppose the new organization before it had an opportunity to prove itself. Invited to assist the CMS, a priest in Liverpool offered a characteristic reply: “A society having for its object the increase of pure religion seems to me essentially defective if it has not the patronage and support of those to whom I owe deference as exercising the apostolic office and functions in our Church.”5 The full name of the organization (after 1812) was the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East. Its founders obviously did not have the Americas in their view at all. Perhaps they thought that Africa and the East deserved special attention, because missionary activity there was particularly difficult thanks to the opposition of large financial and political interests such as the East India Company. Because the evangelical patrons of the CMS were active in the antislavery movement, however, it was soon turning part of its attention to the West Indies. Before long, some of its Canadian correspondents were encouraging it to begin missions to the native people of the Pacific Coast and the Northwest. Both areas were extremely remote, but the Northwest was less remote because Hudson’s Bay was more or less due west of the Orkney Islands; the route to British Columbia, however, was around South America. King Charles II had given the Northwest to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, and the Honourable Company had been exploiting it commercially ever since. The region was called Rupert’s Land after Prince Rupert, a cousin of the king and the first governor of the company. The name has now disappeared from use except as the name of one of the four ecclesiastical provinces of the Anglican Church of Canada, the province that includes all dioceses north of the U.S. border, from the Rocky Mountains to northwest Ontario. The original Rupert’s Land was even bigger. It included all territory whose waters drained into Hudson’s Bay, a more immense area than anyone could have known in 1670, stretching from the Rockies all the way to Labrador, north of the Laurentian and Mississippi watersheds. France renounced its claims to this territory in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Most of the First Nations (or Indian nations) were later induced to surrender their claims to the territory by treaty, but that is another, and less happy, story.

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anglicans in canada Until 1811 there were no European settlements in Rupert’s Land, only a native population estimated at about fifty thousand and a network of trading posts. For many years the Honourable Company opposed settlements, which it thought could only undermine its own position there. But partly because it was wearisome to have to import all supplies from England and partly because an influential Hudson’s Bay shareholder, the Earl of Selkirk, made it a personal project, a settlement was established in 1811 at Red River, south of Lake Winnipeg. In the early 1820s its population was enlarged by retirees from the company and surplus workers cast off after the company’s amalgamation with its old rival, the North West Company. The Honourable Company decided to supply a Protestant minister, and in 1820 it appointed the Rev. John West (1778–1845).6 West was unusual among CMS missionaries, who were, as a rule, not so respectable in class, so refined in manners, so well educated, or so fortunately connected as their SPG brethren. Few, in fact, could ever have hoped for ordination to a parish in England. As a consequence, it has been argued, the typical CMS missionary was “a potential radical who could easily become a threat to the status quo.” 7 West, by contrast, was an Oxford graduate and a parish priest in Essex. With the company’s permission, West approached the CMS about funding Indian schools at the Red River. The CMS took on the project, at first as a trial and then more permanently. West later published a journal of his adventures (excerpted in Document 2). At the end of May 1820 he and a new schoolmaster boarded the one ship a year that made the trip to Hudson’s Bay when it was likely to be free of ice, and eleven weeks later the ship deposited them at York Factory on the shores of Hudson’s Bay. The settlement, strategically located at the entrance to the Saskatchewan River system, was the depot for all goods in and out of the Northwest. From there it was a four-week trip to Norway House on the north shore of Lake Winnipeg. It took another week to cross to the south shore six hundred kilometers away. It was then another day to the Red River settlement, where West was based for the next three years. At that time—and for another forty years—Red River was the only real colony in the Northwest.8 West led services there, gave religious instruction, offered pastoral care, baptized, persuaded couples who lived together with children to take vows of marriage, evangelized Indians, and opened the church and school to which St. John’s Cathedral and St. John’s College, Winnipeg, trace their origins. He envisioned the Red River settlement as a missionary center for the entire Northwest, which indeed is what it became. West also visited Brandon, Fort Churchill, and other company posts as well. West was not overly diplomatic when he criticized the moral standards and materialism of the fur-trading culture. He drew unfortunate comparisons between the professed concern of the company for Indians and the professed concern of the governors of the West Indies for black slaves. He also advocated Indian education and denounced the liquor trade. When he returned to England

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questions about missionary work on furlough in 1823, George Simpson, the Hudson’s Bay governor, ensured that he stayed there. Simpson and West symbolize the tensions that existed for many years between company and clergy. The Northwest was a vast company town. The company controlled transportation, supplies, and labor and expected its dependents to exhibit a cooperative attitude. Company and clergy could be allies when they had common enemies or common goals, but they could easily become rivals. During the 1860s, when a movement arose to pressure the government of Canada to take control of the Northwest, most Christian missionaries supported it. Indeed, some of them led it. Canada bought the territory from the Honourable Company in 1868. West’s The Substance of a Journal during a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America: and Frequent Excursions among the North-West American Indians in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 1823, a missionary report written to edify and inspire the English public and win its support, is a fine example of a very popular genre of Canadian literature. West took his place in a line stretching back to New France in 1632, when Jesuit missionaries began writing letters for publication back home. The appeal of West’s mission journal suggests several reasons why missions to the Northwest figured so prominently in Church life and in the Church’s sense of identity and vocation. First, there was a romance to Canadian mission. The Northwest was remote and little known, huge and beautiful, rugged and harsh; the missionaries themselves labored heroically against heavy odds. Second, the native people of the territory fascinated Europeans— and eastern Canadians, too. Readers devoured the dramatic stories of Indian life and history and the quasi-anthropology that missionaries reported. The historian of the CMS observed that of all its missions, those to the Indians were the most popular with the organization’s supporters. In fact, jealous CMS missionaries in China complained of receiving insufficient support by comparison, noting that all the Indians in all of BNA taken together would not populate even a single medium-sized Chinese city. But CMS officials replied that it was easier to raise funds for Indian missions. Third, it was axiomatic to nineteenth-century Anglicans—and, of course, to others—that eternal salvation depended on faith in Christ and saving souls was the greatest philanthropy of all. Fourth, interesting literature has villains, and mission literature strategically painted unsympathetic portraits of unbelieving European men—the miners, lumberjacks, and fur-traders who drank, swore, mistreated women, and harassed and exploited Indians. Now we often think of the missionaries as agents of imperialism, but they were also among its severest critics, for they saw it at its worst. For Anglicans in the nineteenth century, the Church was not only a religious ministry but also an educational agency, and John West’s Journal describes how he began a school for Indians. Many who attended this school became prominent leaders. It was the first Indian school in the Northwest, and it set the model for Indian schools throughout the territory, which, in turn, set the model for

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anglicans in canada Indian schools in the rest of the country. They were intended to convert and “civilize”—or, perhaps, to civilize and convert; the two were conceived as indissolubly joined. Civilizing Indians usually involved changing them from nomadic hunters to settled farmers; teaching them English; exploding their superstitions (that is, their religious beliefs); baptizing them with English names; clothing them with English dress; teaching them an appreciation for English technology and agriculture and standards of sanitation; instilling the norms of British order and discipline; and correcting the defects of their culture, such as polygamy, mistreatment of women, and infanticide. Not all the objectives were bad, and not all the methods were good. A later generation is free to acknowledge the pain and injustice that the system often inflicted over the course of many decades. But three considerations are pertinent.9 First, English national pride—a polite term for what might justly be called racism—was part of the landscape of the Empire; the British reckoned British standards to be the norm of civilized behavior in all their colonies, whether Red River or Bombay or Nairobi or Hong Kong or Montreal. Second, the programmatic and authoritarian educational theory applied to Indian children was essentially the same as that applied to white children, albeit modified to accommodate the smaller budgets of the schools and the lower expectations of the teachers. Third, missionaries did not begin the process of disrupting Indian society. Although all historical societies are always changing, ethnological studies have shown that Indian societies in the Northwest were already in a particularly rapid and painful transition because of overhunting and the extinction of food species, British commercial activity, European diseases, rivalries among various Indian nations, and American encroachments. From an anthropological perspective, missionaries often functioned less as agents of disruption than as agents of reintegration in a disrupted situation. Christianity succeeded not because missionaries upset satisfactory Indian religious systems but because these religious systems were linked to a way of life that was already vanishing. Indigenous people, compelled to adjust to new ways of life, were curious about the new spiritualities they saw connected to them. As a historian of the diocese of Saskatchewan suggests, “The introduction of Christianity to the Indians in this Diocese was usually as a result of their own urgent request to be taught the Christian faith. . . . The Indians at La Ronge, as well as those under the leadership of Starblanket and Big Child, all were taught the Christian faith because of their insistence. . . . In those cases where this was not perhaps the case, such as Nepowewin and the Devon Mission, Christianity was brought to the Indians by members of their own race.”10 Missionaries made little progress among those who did not want to receive them. A historian of the religious encounter between Christian missionaries and Canadian Indians is led to the double-edged conclusion that most Indians “were eager for Christianity, but that they were allowed to receive it only on terms destructive to their culture and humiliating to their pride.”11

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questions about missionary work Among the Cree who were converted to Christianity by the Anglicans, two were mentioned in West’s Journal and are especially noteworthy. Peguis (ca. 1774–1864), chief of the Red River Indians, had greeted the first British settlers when they had arrived in 1812 and shown them how to survive.12 He and his wife were baptized in 1840. A letter written by him in 1838, when one of their missionaries was leaving and another was thinking of doing so (Document 3), provides an idea of what a native Canadian hearing the missionaries’ preaching might have understood to be the Gospel of Christ—or, at least, an idea of what a native Canadian thought a missionary society would want a native Canadian to believe. A second Swampy Cree convert was named, perhaps, Sakacewascam. He was “the orphan son of a deceased Indian and a halfcaste woman” whom West met at Norway House in 1820. Native converts were expected to receive British names, and Sakacewascam was baptized in 1822 with the name Henry Budd (1812?-75) after an English evangelical minister with whom West had worked.13 Budd was educated at the CMS school at Red River, went to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and then was recruited as a CMS teacher. He was sent first to a new mission center at Cumberland House, eight hundred kilometers away, and then to the site now known as The Pas, where he began a mission school that was startlingly successful. When a CMS priest visited several months later, Budd presented him with thirty-eight adults, twenty-two children, and twenty-seven infants to be baptized. As soon as the first bishop came to Rupert’s Land, Budd was ordained. The Henry Budd College for Ministry at The Pas, Manitoba, an Anglican theological school, is named for him. The CMS sought to build a native leadership for the mission field. Many indigenous men were ordained to the priesthood, although in CMS days—indeed, until the 1980s—none was made a bishop. Robert McDonald (1829–1913), arguably the most observant, creative, and effective of all Canadian Anglican missionaries, should have been made first bishop of Athabasca, but he was mixed-blood Ojibway, and so the appointment went to the incompetent pedant W. C. Bompas.14 Thomas Vincent (1835–1907), archdeacon of Moose, should have become the second bishop of Moosonee, but he was half Cree.15 Of the very diversely gifted Edward Ahenakew (1885–1961)—Cree, Anglican priest, missionary, scholar, administrator, newspaper editor, linguist, poet, medical worker, and native rights activist—Carrington wrote that he “might well have been made our first Indian bishop if only more imagination had been shown.”16 But the problem was not precisely lack of imagination; it was racism. The fault cannot be entirely ascribed to the CMS, which had a “Native Church Policy” directed toward the early indigenization of mission churches and had arranged for a native African to be consecrated bishop in 1864. By the end of the century it was estimated that of fifty-three thousand Indians in Rupert’s Land, most were Christian, including seventeen thousand Anglicans. “If the measure of success is that most Indians have become Chris-

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anglicans in canada tian,” a historian observes, “the measure of failure is that Christianity has not become Indian.”17 The CMS continued to give generous support to Indian ministries in Rupert’s Land until after the turn of the century, and then it adopted a policy of gradual withdrawal. In 1918 the national Church launched its first significant capital fund-raising campaign, the Anglican Forward Movement, to raise an endowment primarily to replace CMS funding. The CMS ended its support of the Canadian Church at the end of 1920. It changed its name in 1995 to the “Church Mission Society.”

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The Colonial and Continental Church Society The society of many names began existence as the Society for Educating the Poor of Newfoundland. But that was a long name, and it was usually called the Newfoundland School Society. It was begun in 1823 by one of the island’s leading merchants, an evangelical Anglican named Samuel Codner (1776–1858) who was dismayed that seventy thousand Newfoundlanders lacked opportunities for education. The new society was his thank-offering for a narrow escape from drowning. It was an experience he loved to recount, and thirty years later he was distributing engravings depicting his rescue. The society was “Scriptural, Protestant, and Evangelical” as well as lay-oriented and ecumenically spirited. Members of the CMS figured prominently among its early supporters, and members of other denominations sometimes taught in its schools. The first Anglican bishop of Newfoundland, Aubrey Spencer (1795–1872), who was evangelically inclined himself, gladly supported the society. He even ordained its teachers to the permanent diaconate. By 1836 the society claimed to have educated about 16,500 people. The second Anglican bishop of Newfoundland, Edward Feild (1801– 1876), who succeeded Spencer in 1844, had not a single ecumenical bone in his body and by 1849 would have nothing to do with the society. In 1923 this original part of the society’s work was merged into the Anglican school system of Newfoundland, and it helped lay the ground for the denominational educational system in that province.18 The society expanded into every part of Canada. It had first thought of extending operations to the mainland in 1829, and accordingly changed its name to the Newfoundland and British North America Society for Educating the Poor, but it was another nine years before it arrived in Quebec. Its success there was connected with the zealous Mark Willoughby (1796–1844), who became first the assistant secretary of the society, then its superintendent in Newfoundland, and later its superintendent in Montreal. He died of typhus through ministering to immigrants in the government’s quarantine sheds on Grosse Ile in the St. Lawrence River. His work was carried on by one of his protégés from Newfoundland, William Bennett Bond (1815–1906), who had followed him to Quebec. Bond later became bishop of Montreal and primate of the Church of England in Canada.19

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questions about missionary work The society turned its attention to British residents on the European continent in 1839 and then, at the suggestion of Bishop Spencer and others, to other colonies. In 1846 it changed its name to the Church of England Society for Educating the Poor of Newfoundland and the Colonies. Then it merged in 1851 with an evangelical school society for Australia that had begun work in Nova Scotia; the name of the merged organization was the Colonial Church and School Society. Its work now had three streams: ordained missionaries, schoolmasters and catechists, and bible schools. In 1861 it would adopt its most familiar name, the Colonial and Continental Church Society (Col. & Con.). Evangelical dioceses in Canada particularly welcomed its support. In the diocese of Huron, for example, it aided at least forty-five parishes. The society had a particular knack for identifying overlooked needs for ministry and responding creatively and evangelistically. It sent its first missionaries to Rupert’s Land in 1850 to begin the church that is now St. James, Winnipeg, and over the next century it gave support to every diocese in the ecclesiastical Province of Rupert’s Land. After the United States enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Col. & Con. began a mission to American slaves who escaped to freedom in Canada. Most of the forty thousand fugitive slaves who arrived in Canada between 1850 and the Civil War settled in southwestern Ontario towns such as Dresden, where the reputed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is now a tourist attraction. The mission to “the free coloured population in Canada” was started by a Col. & Con. superintendent named Isaac Hellmuth (1820–1901), a converted Polish Jew who was later the founding principal of Huron College and the second bishop of Huron.20 The society also assisted the beginnings of Huron College in London, Wycliffe College in Toronto, Emmanuel College in Prince Albert, and Latimer Hall in Vancouver. The society’s finest chapter in its Canadian history may have come in the first decade of the twentieth century, when floods of settlers were sweeping into the prairies, attracted by government promises of free land in Saskatchewan and aggressive marketing by canny railway companies. It initially became involved through a member of its deputation (public relations) staff in England, George Exton Lloyd (1861–1940), who knew Canada well. He had attended Wycliffe College and had pastored in Manitoba, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. A tremendously energetic, efficient, and personable man with a penchant for self-advertisement, he became chaplain to a British colonizing expedition of some 2,700 British men, women, and children bound for Saskatchewan. When they arrived in Canada, Lloyd displaced the organizer, Isaac Barr, but how he did so is disputed.21 Lloyd’s version was that the colonists, discovering that Barr had failed to make adequate preparations, asked Lloyd to assume the leadership. Another version, proposed in a 1969 book whose author interviewed several of the colonists, is that Lloyd steadily undermined Barr’s authority during the Atlantic crossing and on their arrival in Canada prevailed on him to resign. It is likely that Barr, who had been drummed out of the diocese of Huron for his progres-

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anglicans in canada sive views of evolution, and Lloyd, an opinionated and humorless evangelical, were never destined to be soulmates. In the event, Lloyd led the group to the town that now bears his name, Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, in 1903. His colonists planted settlements along the railway line and erected churches according to standard specifications, then called “Canterbury cathedrals” and now “Bishop Lloyd churches.” With the help of Col. & Con. and others, the diocese of Saskatchewan grew dramatically. It had only twenty-two parishes and missions in 1905, but by 1914 it had 128, with 300 congregations. Col. & Con. sponsored dozens of ordinands through their theological training at Emmanuel College in Prince Albert; the first twenty-seven became deacons in 1910. Lloyd later fell out with Col. & Con. and turned to organizing the “Fellowship of the Maple Leaf” to send teachers to the Canadian prairies. In 1921 he was elected bishop of Saskatchewan. Col. & Con. ended most of its support for Canada during World War II. With the decline of colonialism, it changed its name to the Commonwealth and Continental Church Society, and it is now the Intercontinental Church Society.

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The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698, was chronologically the first of the great English mission societies and was inspired by the same Thomas Bray who a few years later founded the SPG.22 Its leadership was less high profile and official than that of the SPG, its purposes were more strictly educational, and its scope included England as well as settlements in “foreign parts.” As with the SPG, the SPCK reflected its founder’s intent to build sound practical religion on sound theological learning. For the “plantations” or colonies, its original objects were to fund parish libraries with “some of the best books in divinity” for the clergy, to give free practical religious literature to laypeople, to establish free catechetical schools for the needy, and to convert the Quakers who had gone to the New World seeking religious freedom. Its only contribution to what is now Canada in its first century of existence was a “sum not exceeding £6” in March 1701 to buy church bibles and prayer books for John Jackson at “St. John’s Fort,” Newfoundland. But as soon as the SPG was operating, the SPCK deferred and withdrew. It renewed attention to BNA after dioceses were created and bishops appointed. In 1814 the SPCK formed a district committee in Halifax along the lines of similar district committees being created in England. The bishop was president, and the lieutenant governor was patron. The committee raised funds for the SPCK, which in return sent literature for the district committee to distribute. In 1816 the depository at Halifax reported sending out 167 bibles, 144 New Testaments, 372 prayer books, and 6,570 books and tracts. Committees were established in Quebec shortly afterward. On several occasions the SPCK sent large discretionary block-grants to bishops for diocesan work, and for many years it made

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questions about missionary work large grants for post-secondary education at King’s College, Windsor; Bishop’s College, Lennoxville; Trinity College, Toronto; and St. John’s College, Winnipeg. It also helped toward the building of churches for whites and Indians.

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British Columbia The last mission field to open in BNA was the Pacific Coast.23 In what is now British Columbia there were no clergy and no congregations before 1849. In that year the Hudson’s Bay Company appointed a chaplain to its settlement at Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island, the new headquarters of its Pacific Coast operations. He failed to please, and his successor failed to stay. The third chaplain, in 1855, was the very popular Edward Cridge (chapter 4). On the mainland, gold was discovered on the Fraser River in 1858. Population surged, and the SPG, with particular interest in English-speaking settlements, began sponsoring missionaries there in 1858. Col. & Con. began sending missionaries the same year. Also in 1858, a wealthy Englishwoman who specialized in endowing colonial bishoprics gave money for a diocese of Columbia, or British Columbia. Having paid the piper she called the tune, and she nominated George Hills (1816–95) as the first bishop of the new diocese.23 The northern coast remained Indian territory, and missions to the Indians fell as usual to the CMS. The first CMS missionary arrived in 1857, a layperson named William Duncan (1832–1918) who was perhaps the most controversial missionary in Canadian history. He proved unusually effective in gaining Tsimshian followers but unusually autocratic in directing their lives—or so he has usually been portrayed. Opinions differ over whether he was maligned by ecclesiastical critics who resented him for thumbing his nose at Church discipline or by British commercial executives who found themselves in economic competition with the Indians he trained. The Anglican community Duncan created at Metlakatla, across the harbor from present-day Prince Rupert, successfully defied three bishops between 1862 and 1887. Then he moved it to Alaska.24

Missions to French Canadians A few Anglicans wanted to use missions not to convert the heathen to Christianity but to convert Christians of other views to Anglicanism. The implication was that these non-Anglicans were being deprived of the pure Gospel, the properly ordered sacraments, and the true Church. In the older American colonies, SPG missionaries had often sought to convert Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and other Protestants to their own high-church, sacramental, and episcopalian views. They had many successes, none more exciting that the “Yale apostasies” of 1722, when the rector and several teachers at Congregationalist Yale announced that they were turning Anglican. Some evangelical Anglicans,

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anglicans in canada for their part, notably in Ireland, sought to convert Roman Catholics to Protestantism just as some Roman Catholic clergy sought to convert Protestants. These precedents inspired similar efforts in French Canada. As in Ireland, proselytism in Quebec had political implications. Many in the Anglo community thought that the French fact was an obstacle to progress and good government and that French Canadians were superstitious and potentially disloyal. That population could obviously not be eliminated by force, but perhaps, they thought, it could be assimilated. In the decade or two after the War of 1812, several British Army officers who had Anglican evangelical convictions retired in Quebec. One of them, William Plenderleath Christie (1780–1845), received an inheritance in 1835 of several seigneuries in the upper Richelieu Valley and a tidy fortune to go with them. As a seigneur, according to the laws of New France, which the British had confirmed, he enjoyed considerable local authority, and his wealth extended his powers. He decided to proselytize Roman Catholics according to what we have called the Irish model of Anglicanism. From the Old World he brought small colonies of French-speaking Protestant immigrants to his lands, people who could potentially be employed as evangelists, teachers, and clergy. At Christieville, he set up a parish church that he intended to be a center of proselytism. It was Christie who invited Mark Willoughby of the Newfoundland and BNA Society for Educating the Poor to come to Montreal. Willoughby’s task was to start schools where Roman Catholic children could be converted to Protestantism, and by 1844 seventy of these schools were educating seven hundred francophone Roman Catholic pupils. In 1839 Christie helped found the interdenominational French Canadian Missionary Society, and, when the bishop refused to countenance Anglican participation in an ecumenical organization, he founded the short-lived Church of England French Canadian Missionary Society in 1841. After Christie’s death in 1845 his seigneuries were parceled out in the inheritance, but his widow, Amelia Bowman Christie, carried on the mission, which was moved to Sabrevois in Canada East. Col. & Con. increased its financial support, and in 1852 it also received ownership of the Anglican parish church and the right of appointing its minister. All this activity appalled many Anglicans, not least the two successive bishops who had to deal with most of it. They thought it politically unwise and theologically indecent. They spoke against it, published pastoral letters against it, and maneuvered against it. But without canonical power over the laity they had only the occasional opportunity of leverage against it. One such opportunity arose in 1852. The bishop of Montreal, Francis Fulford, contrived to have himself made honorary president of the Montreal branch of Col. & Con., and from that base he turned the mission into a francophone school system. In that guise, the Sabrevois mission declined until it finally disappeared in 1911.25

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questions about missionary work

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The Diocesan Church Societies The unexpected news of 1832 that the British government would be withdrawing its financial support of overseas churches came as a huge shock to colonial Anglicans.26 They were unprepared for the challenge of bearing most of the burden of their churches in the same way that Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists did. Even with British financial assistance, Anglican needs were not being met. In New Brunswick, for example, there were eighty parishes but only forty-three buildings for worship and just twenty-eight clergy. Anglicans in BNA were finally compelled to construct an effective mechanism for supporting mission churches in their own land. It is perhaps natural that they decided to emulate the model of the SPCK and the SPG. In 1836 an important new initiative along that line was launched by Archdeacon George Coster (1794–1859), whose jurisdiction included all of New Brunswick with the unofficial exception of Trinity Church in Saint John, which was too important and too wealthy to pay much attention to archdeacons.27 Coster called his clergy to a meeting in September and drew up a constitution for what he called a church society for the archdeaconry. It would be a mission society by and for the Anglicans of New Brunswick. Laypeople in every parish would be invited to join, and their membership fees and any other funds they might canvass would go toward paying clergy stipends, building new churches, distributing books and tracts, opening Sunday schools, and granting scholarships to theological students. As with the SPG, direction would be given by a central committee of the élite and influential, clergy and lay alike. The bishop’s word would be final over all of them. “What we want in the Province,” said Coster, “is clearly this—something that will powerfully stir up the people of every class, to take that interest in the maintenance and prosperity of the church which heretofore has not, by every one’s acknowledgment, been manifested.”28 Back in England, the SPG secretary declared that the church society of New Brunswick was “the first systematic attempt made in a British colony for the more full and efficient support of its own Church.”29 That is perhaps not quite precise. The historian Thomas Millman was able to identify a few earlier efforts, but no previous colonial mission group had survived very long. The new organization caught on to an unprecedented extent. Following New Brunswick, other archdeaconries and dioceses formed church societies over the next several years: Nova Scotia in 1837; Prince Edward Island in 1840; Newfoundland, Toronto, and Quebec in 1843; Montreal and Huron almost as soon as those dioceses were formed (in 1850 and 1858, respectively); and British Columbia in 1861. Colonial governments incorporated the church societies or found other ways to permit them to own property. Historians do not agree whether the real initiator of the church society in New Brunswick was Coster or his bishop, John Inglis. Inglis appears to take the credit in an early letter to Coster about the matter (Document 4). In any event,

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anglicans in canada given that it was now necessary for Canadians to assume the functions of the SPG and the SPCK, it was a fairly obvious inspiration. Most church societies were later amalgamated into diocesan synods, which created mission boards and committees to carry on the work. But here as always there were debates because some thought the oversight of missions should be kept distinct from synodical government. The diocese of Quebec still has its church society and calls itself the “oldest missionary society in the Canadian Church” (i.e., the oldest still in operation). Prince Edward Island also still has its Anglican church society, through which it enjoys a measure of ecclesiastical self-government in a diocese dominated by Nova Scotia.

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The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society The dioceses in what we now call Ontario and Quebec were organized in 1860 into what was called the ecclesiastical Province of Canada (chapter 3), and twelve years later the provincial synod decided to create an entire missionary diocese.30 This was a departure from earlier practice; dioceses until then had been organized only after a salary had been guaranteed or endowed for the new bishop. But, it was argued, even impoverished new territories needed ministry, and ministry needed bishops. The new diocese, called Algoma, stretched a thousand miles from the Muskoka lakes north of Toronto to somewhere between Lake Superior and Winnipeg—no one knew exactly where at first and it hardly mattered—with the see city at Sault Ste. Marie (the “Soo”). It had nine churches and seven clergy. The main task of the bishop of Algoma was to make eloquent appeals for assistance at wealthy parishes and missionary meetings in eastern Canada and England. The first bishop, Frederick Dawson Fauquier (1817–81), who accepted his bishopric before anyone told him that it had no money, spent most of the year outside his diocese on long fund-raising tours and wore himself out.31 His successor Edward Sullivan (1832–99), one of the star Anglican preachers of his generation, went on even longer fund-raising tours and lost his health in 1893. Sullivan liked to call himself a “mitred mendicant.”32 The bishops of Algoma applauded the provincial synod for its grand missionary vision but wished that it had found an equally impressive vision for funding. To help raise funds for the struggling diocese, and also to respond to an enthusiasm for foreign missions that was burgeoning all over the Protestant world, the provincial synod in 1880 created two mission boards, one for domestic missions and one for foreign missions. Unfortunately, it expected them to depend on the generosity of the Anglican laity, seldom a good idea. When that approach proved unprofitable, the bishops of the province ordered an address to be read to every congregation on December 23, 1883, chiding worshipers for their meager support, which they described as “palpable neglect and unholy apathy.”33 On mature reflection, the provincial synod then decided that one

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questions about missionary work insolvent mission board would be more efficient than two, and it amalgamated the two boards into what was called the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS), modelled on an organization of exactly the same name that the Episcopal Church in the United States had created in 1820. The Canadian canon or church law that created it copied the American principle that all members of the Church were also members of the mission society. The DFMS sponsored mission meetings, raised money, published an excellent monthly magazine entitled the Canadian Church Magazine and Mission News, and sent funds to the diocese of Algoma. It also made half-hearted efforts to support mission work in the Canadian Northwest. In 1898 it lavished $250 on the Northwest, its first gift to that province in four years. In 1891 it sent out its first foreign missionary, who spent a long career in Nagano, Japan. The Women’s Auxiliary to the DFMS, a much more effective and efficient organization, will be considered in chapter 6. One reason the DFMS was impecunious was that evangelical Anglicans were reluctant to support it, and most Anglicans in Victorian Canada were evangelical. They found the DFMS a bit too bureaucratic, a bit too lacking in energy and vision and initiative, and, to be candid, a bit too high church. They developed alternative mission societies. The Wycliffe College Alumni Association sent evangelical Anglican missionaries to Japan in 1888 and 1889. From this came the Wycliffe Missions, which developed in 1894 into the Canadian Church Missionary Association in Connection with the CMS of England, which in 1902 changed its name to the Canadian Church Missionary Society (CCMS). The DFMS was none too happy to be in rivalry with the Canadian branch of an English mission society. But there was, after all, good precedent for multiple mission societies in the Church of England itself, where the high church had their SPG and the evangelicals had their CMS. Because the evangelicals’ mission organization in Canada was the Canadian CMS, waggish observers remarked that the DFMS was, by default, the Canadian SPG. Still, the diversity that might be justified in a wealthy country such as England seemed inefficient in a struggling young country such as Canada. A group of seven Canadian bishops protested the situation to the CMS in 1897; the CMS was serene. Another approach would have to be found toward consolidation.

The Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada In 1893 the Anglican dioceses and provinces of Canada were brought into a unified national organization that would be governed by a body called “General Synod,” meeting once every three years or so. Western Canadian Anglicans brimmed with hope that eastern Canada would now give greater support to western missions. Western hopes made easterners nervous. The archbishop of the struggling diocese of Rupert’s Land fought hard for an effective national

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anglicans in canada mission society. The great and powerful diocese of Montreal, the commercial and financial capital of Canada, resisted almost equally hard. In 1896 General Synod created a national mission board. Before it began to operate, Montreal professed to discover that the new scheme contained some potential violations of the Basal Principles of General Synod. The archbishop of Rupert’s Land, greatly frustrated, spoke of the “checkmating ways of the East.” A historian of the diocese of Montreal notes that its bishop was in any event cool toward the national consolidation of the Church and stood for “diocesan independence, for the right to solve local problems by local means.”34 There was no meeting of General Synod between 1896 and 1902, so it was only then that a national Anglican mission society, the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC), was formed. The CCMS was merged into it, and it took another three years before the MSCC began to operate effectively. Thus it was that, precisely in the decade when western Canada was growing most dramatically, the Anglican Church was unprepared to meet the needs. The bishop of Saskatchewan reported to his synod that “churches closed, missions vacant, the support of your clergy promised by the people, yet withheld; congregations far smaller than they should be. . . . No wonder if the Church has gone backwards instead of forwards.”35 The answer, once again, was to appeal to England. Considerable help came from Col. & Con.; in addition, the archbishops of Canterbury and York launched the Archbishops’ Western Canada Fund in 1910. As the CMS withdrew from its Canadian work between 1903 and 1920, most English funding evaporated. The majority of British missionaries returned home as well. The MSCC could scarcely match the grants the CMS had been giving the western dioceses, nor did it have the personnel or the expertise to take over all the work itself. But so far as they could, the MSCC and the dioceses determined to maintain the mission policies that had proven effective. In particular, in missions to aboriginals they sought to continue the CMS policy of building not Anglican churches but native churches. Anglicans significantly exceeded other denominations in appointing native workers. In 1916, for example, the MSCC was employing seventy-five native agents and ninety-two white.36 After about 1920, however, the MSCC began to strengthen its position, in significant part because of the success of the Anglican Forward Movement and also because of a booming economy after World War I, improved cooperation with the Women’s Auxiliary (chapter 6), and more effective marketing and public relations. Soon it was administering by far the largest budget, the largest staff, and the largest program in the Church of England in Canada. In general, aboriginal people did not benefit from the transition from CMS missions to MSCC missions. CMS missionaries typically spent decades in Indian ministry, learned the languages, came to appreciate the cultures, shared the hardships, and were part of the communities. MSCC missionary tenures in Indian ministries were usually much shorter. Indians spoke of “suitcase” min-

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questions about missionary work istries. One priest, for example, who was fully delighting in Indian ministry in the Yukon, recalled that after a mere four years his bishop forced him to move to a white congregation. It was considered a promotion.37 It is not possible to generalize about motives and performance, because missionaries disagreed in their understanding of missions, took diverse approaches, and were variously gifted and qualified. On the notable question of inculturation, for instance, some wanted to prohibit pagan native symbols and customs, whereas others wanted to find ways to adapt them to Christian use. Some, like Robert McDonald of Alaska and Athabasca, and Frederick DuVernet (1860–1924), bishop of Caledonia in British Columbia, found creative ways to integrate Indian religious beliefs and forms and symbols into Christianity. While some other missionaries wanted totem poles banned, for example, DuVernet encouraged Christian native craftspeople to carve them with Christian emblems. Missionaries also disagreed whether it was part of their job to undertake political advocacy for Indians through churches and governments. Probably most did. A historian has suggested that had there been missionaries to the Indians in Newfoundland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Beothuks might not have been extinguished.38 In 1967, as the Anglican Church of Canada was ceasing to treat the country’s aboriginal people as a mission field, there were reportedly 215,000 registered Indians in Canada, of whom about 25 percent were Anglican. There were thirteen thousand Inuit, of whom 82 percent were Anglican. There were also two hundred thousand non-registered persons of Indian origin whose denominational affiliations were not analyzed.

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Indian Residential Schools The biggest single item in the budget of the MSCC concerned Indian residential schools.39 In 1958, for example, the MSCC spent $1.5 million on Indian school administration but $862,000 on everything else combined. Most expenses involving these schools were covered by federal government grants. The $1.5 million item in the 1958 budget was almost entirely a flow-through from the Canadian government to the schools, except for $20,000 from the MSCC and $4,000 from the Women’s Auxiliary. In other words, ordinary Anglicans put very little money into the enterprise, but the administration of the national Church devoted a great deal of time and energy to it. Long before there was an MSCC, Anglicans were running Indian residential schools, although that term was not used until 1920. The schools began, it has been said, when missionaries and their families brought Indian orphans into their homes, or when they cared for children whose parents were away hunting or taught those whose parents wanted them to have a Euro-Canadian education. Various mission societies subsequently developed institutional settings for schooling. The first to do so was the oldest of all the Anglican mission societ-

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anglicans in canada ies, the New England Company, which originated in Oliver Cromwell’s time and was chartered in 1662 for the purpose of promoting religion in America and educating the native population. From 1786 to 1826 it supported what proved to be a corrupt and uninspired program of Indian education in New Brunswick. In 1828 it founded the Mohawk Institute in Brantford (Ontario), and in 1901 St. George’s residential school in Lytton, British Columbia. The New England Company still exists as a registered charity in England and Wales. The federal government became involved in Indian education in northwestern Ontario and points west (where by far most Canadian Indians lived) after 1868 when it took control of that area. Seeking to pave the way for English settlers and secure the territory against American encroachments, the government began signing treaties with Indian nations. In those treaties the government promised to provide Indian children with schooling. But how could it create and administer schools? The government commissioned an Irish Canadian journalist, Nicholas Flood Davin, to find an answer. The Davin Report of 1879 recognized an urgent need for Indian schooling and also recognized that the government lacked the resources to address the problem. Seeing, however, that the churches were already doing good work in the area, Davin recommended government funding of church-sponsored Indian schools.40 The government adopted the report, and during the 1880s it began giving grants to churches for a ministry they were already doing and wanted to do, which naturally delighted the churches. As more Indian nations entered into treaty, the dominion government offered churches more grants for more schools. The temptation proved irresistible to Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and the Roman Catholic religious orders. It was quite easily resisted by those like the Baptists, who refused on theological principle to accept government assistance. The residential schools program was rationalized following the passage of the Indian Act of 1894. At that point, regulations were passed by order in council, contracts were signed, and rates of funding were standardized. Soon the schools far overshadowed all other forms of native ministry in the Anglican Church. The collaboration between “throne and altar” was an odd one. The Church saw Indians as souls to be saved and converts to be educated; the government saw Indians as a political problem to be solved, preferably without undue expense. For both Church and government, “civilizing” Indians (that is, europeanizing them) was part of the strategy. The larger purposes were different, however, and tensions resulted. Not everyone supported the collaboration. Samuel Hume Blake (1835–1914), a board member of the MSCC, vigorously attacked it. The sharp-tongued Blake, a founder of the very prominent Toronto law firm now known as Blake, Cassels, and Graydon, was an ultra-evangelical member of his diocesan synod and General Synod, the chief organizer of Wycliffe College, and an influential supporter of numerous educational and other causes.41 In 1904 he chaired an MSCC

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questions about missionary work committee of investigation of Indian schools, and he was appalled. He found that, educationally, they were of dismal quality; physically, they were unsanitary; administratively, they were corrupt and unaccountable; and, morally, they were scandalous. They served little purpose, he thought, except to give western bishops an excuse for drawing in eastern money. He urged that they be given over to the government so the Church’s mission funds could be put to better use. Blake succeeded in persuading the MSCC in 1907 to pass a resolution favoring the secularization of Indian schools, and he published his views in 1908 in one of his many inflammatory pamphlets on Church-related subjects, Don’t You Hear the Red Man Calling? (excerpted in Document 5). But by 1910 the western bishops and the missionary establishment had outflanked him, and the MSCC rescinded its resolution of 1907. It also removed Blake from the committee of investigation. A few weeks later, the churches and Ottawa signed a new memorandum of agreement by which the number of schools would be reduced and government per capita subsidies increased. Until 1917 Anglican schools were run by individual dioceses with outside funding, usually from the CMS or MSCC. When the CMS withdrew its funding from the Canadian field, dioceses could not afford to carry the schools by themselves. Between 1917 and 1923, most were transferred to the administration of the MSCC. By exception, three schools remained independent of the MSCC and thereafter negotiated for funding directly with the Department of Indian Affairs of the federal government. These were St. George’s, Lytton, British Columbia, in the Anglican diocese of Cariboo; Gordon’s in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, in the diocese of Qu’Appelle; and the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, in the diocese of Huron. They proved to be among the most notorious for corruption and abuse when lawsuits were being launched in the 1990s. The MSCC set up a school commission to administer Indian residential schools and negotiated contracts and funding with the Department of Indian Affairs. In many cases it enlarged the capacity of the schools. Sometimes it built new schools, beginning with one at Sioux Lookout, Ontario. It employed hundreds of administrators, teachers, and staff members, most of whom likely accepted this ministry as a calling of God and at considerable personal sacrifice. Estimates of pupil populations at Indian residential schools vary. The department of the federal government called at this writing Indian and Northern Affairs Canada estimates that a total of a hundred thousand aboriginal children were in the schools at one time or another. It is possible that five hundred thousand status Indians of school age were eligible to attend. The data in table 2 should not be regarded as precise because of inaccuracies and inconsistent principles of collection in the original MSCC reports to General Synod and also because some interpolations and estimates have been necessary for the purposes of composing the table. In 1955 the MSCC stopped reporting staff numbers because teachers had become government-paid personnel. In addition to the student populations

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anglicans in canada Table 2. Indian Residential School Population, 1924–55 Year

IRS Reported under MSCC

Pupils

Staff

1924 1927 1931 1934 1937 1946 1949 1955

17 18 17 15 17 16 15 13

904 1,041 1,270 1,371 1,391 1,594 1,585 1,815

123 125 154 155 162 180 220

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Source: Data drawn from various MSCC reports to General Synod.

recorded here, a total of about four or five hundred attended the three Anglican Indian residential schools independent of the MSCC. In 1964 it was reported that 2,500 Indian children were attending residential schools, and seven thousand attended federal day schools. The Indian Act made schooling mandatory for Indian children aged seven and older. Where no day schools were locally available and where other arrangements for schooling could not be made, parents were induced to sign permission forms. If parents refused it mattered little, because government regulations under the act authorized federal agents to remove Indian children forcibly from their homes and ship them off to residential schools. These were “total institutions,” which cut students off from their families and cultures, and from wider society, often for many years. For the government, the schools’ primary purpose was to europeanize children so they could enter white Canadian society, a policy the Davin Report called “aggressive civilization.” The Indian Act promised the enfranchisement of Indians as Canadian citizens if they were sufficiently assimilated. For the churches that was not at first the primary purpose, but it seems to have become so by the 1930s because churches are prone to adopt the values of their surrounding culture. In a report to General Synod in 1931, the field secretary in charge described the general policy of the “Indian and Eskimo Commission MSCC” in exactly those terms (Document 6).42 Although there was no one standard Indian residential school experience, it was not unusual for children to be torn from their families, put into uniforms, shorn of their hair, subjected to strict and sometimes abusive discipline, and deprived of the symbols and wisdom of their culture. In class, teachers might demean their people. In many (although not all) schools, children were prohibited from speaking their languages. The premise of assimilation was, in part, the imperturbable confidence of white society that it was superior to all others. Moreover, many Canadian intellectuals believed that, demographically, the Indian population of the country was dying off irreversibly and that it was an act of mercy to invite the survivors into white society. As it turned out, they were wrong about those demograph-

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ics. Between 1924 and 1967 the status Indian population of Canada doubled, and the aboriginal population grew at twice the rate of the national population during the 1950s. The curriculum of residential schools was originally borrowed from the Indian school founded by Richard Pratt in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. It was a “half-day” system. The children had classes and chapel half the day and worked in the fields, outbuildings, laundry, sewing room, or kitchen the other half. The theory was that the children would learn disciplined work habits and citizenship, and the schools would cut expenses and might one day even be almost selfsupporting. Many pupils learned useful skills, enjoyed some of their teachers, graduated, moved on to satisfying jobs or the military or university or even Anglican ministry, and recalled many of their experiences with warmth. Many more, it seems, were sent back to their reserves or to cities with few usable skills and were left to recover by themselves from harsh or abusive discipline and demeaning attitudes. After World War II, dissatisfaction with the residential school system grew. There were signs of a demoralized staff, as one might expect in a poorly funded, low-status occupation in isolated areas with terrible food, brutal weather, and deplorable living conditions. The MSCC report to General Synod in 1949 reported an annual turnover in staff of more than 50 percent, with another 20 percent a year transferring from one school to another. Among the fifteen schools, sixteen principals had resigned in the previous three years. Moreover, many policymakers were doubting the purpose of the schools. All Anglican Indian residential schools had moved from the half-day system to full-day schooling by 1952, and the increasing preference in the churches, the government, and among native people was to integrate pupils into regular provincial school systems.

Foreign Missions From the late 1850s to the 1930s foreign missions thoroughly captivated the imagination of all the western churches, and “evangelizing the world in this generation” was the great ideal. It was not until the 1880s that Canadian Anglicans joined the movement, unless one counts a Canadian Anglican whom the SPG sent to Japan in 1873. In 1888, Wycliffe College alumni sent a missionary to Japan, and in 1891 the DFMS followed suit. By 1900 five Trinity men and two women were working for the DFMS in the northern part of the Canadian mission field, and four Wycliffe men and three women worked for the Canadian CMS in the southern part. The tensions in Canadian Anglicanism between high church and evangelical were thus exported to Japan.43 The Canadian CMS also had missionaries in China, East Africa, and Palestine, and the MSCC inherited them when it absorbed the CCMS.

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anglicans in canada Although through its sixty-five years the MSCC sponsored missionaries in many parts of the world, three fields were particularly important.44 The Canadian field in Japan started first. It became the diocese of mid-Japan in 1912, with a Canadian bishop, and had a staff of about thirty in the 1920s. The second mission field was Honan (now usually Englished as “Henan Sheng”), a province of about thirty-two million people, where the chief missionary, William Charles White (1873–1960), took up work in 1897 for the CMS. (His Chinese collection is now one of the prizes of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.) Honan became a diocese, and White its bishop, in 1909. The mission benefited from the Chinese revolution of 1911, which was friendly to westerners. It administered a hospital, jointly sponsored by several parish churches and the Women’s Auxiliary of the diocese of Huron, and the MSCC supported an educational program. Honan had more than thirty staff members in the 1920s. The third major mission field was Kangra in the Punjab in India. Its work was assumed by the MSCC in 1912 and was known primarily for its medical work and leper homes. It also undertook literacy work, agricultural training, schools, and, at the government’s request, an institution for the rehabilitation of the so-called criminal tribes, who were nomadic people stigmatized by the British government in 1871 in the Criminal Tribes Act. It did not evangelize except among those who asked to know more about Christianity. During the early 1930s, Anglicans in the Japanese and Chinese dioceses asked the MSCC to relinquish its control and permit them to appoint their own bishops. Here was another missionary question for Canadian Anglicans. When was it time to let their foreign mission fields assume independence? The MSCC hesitated, and the commission it appointed to study the matter concluded that these dioceses were not yet ready for indigenization and recommended against the proposal. The Board of Management of the MSCC agreed. But at General Synod in 1934, William White, seconded by Henry Cody of St. Paul’s, Bloor Street, in Toronto, made an impassioned plea to give these dioceses their independence. So strong an impression did White and Cody make that the general secretary of the MSCC changed his mind on the spot, and General Synod agreed unanimously. The decision represented an important step toward the present reality of an Anglican Communion of autonomous provincial churches characterized by a variety of cultures, races, and languages. The diocese of Honan disappeared with Mao Tse-Tung’s rise to power in China. Canada continued to send lay workers, clergy, and bishops to the diocese of mid-Japan, except during World War II. It supported Kangra, and, after 1953, the new diocese of Amritsar, until that diocese joined the ecumenical Church of North India in 1970.

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The Decline of Foreign Mission Consciousness From the 1750s until at least the 1870s, Canadian Anglicans had taken pride in being a mission field of the Church of England. They had treasured their connection with the Church at home (“home” during the colonial period meant England). From the 1870s to the 1960s, Canadian Anglicans took equal pride in supporting missions overseas. Older readers may remember mission events in parish churches, seasonal collection boxes and literature for children, deputation talks by missionaries on furlough armed with magic lantern slides or film strips, fund-raising projects run by the Women’s Auxiliary, knitting bees, missionary letters, campaigns to send bales of blankets and canned goods to Indian schools, and constant references to missions in sermons, Sunday schools, Church periodicals, and, for that matter, the secular press. Few now would doubt that this missionary impulse was often tainted with paternalism and racism. But it also gave Canadian Anglicans a global consciousness. In the late 1930s and early 1940s the intelligentsia of the mission movement were becoming critical of their enterprise. They saw that “missionaries to the heathen” had too often disrespected host cultures, taught European values under the guise of the Gospel, and kept new churches dependent on old churches. The horrors of World War II opened Western eyes to the consequences of racism and religious bigotry. With the decline of colonialism, newly independent developing nations were often reluctant to admit Western Christian missionaries except for nonreligious work. Beginning in the early 1960s, the promotion of the old African colonies of the British Empire to independent nationhood forced changes in the way their Anglican churches related to the worldwide communion. When the Roman Catholic Church convened the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), many Anglicans liked its theology of “inculturation.” Liturgy, for example, was to express catholicity, not by being everywhere the same medieval Latin rite but by in each place assuming the cultural idiom and language of the people. Meanwhile, Church revenues were declining and priorities had to be reviewed; it was found that traditional mission work was in large part dispensable. For all these reasons, Anglican leaders in the early 1960s put an end to the old style of foreign mission work. The symbolic turning point was the Anglican Congress of August 1963, which brought to Toronto a thousand delegates—bishops, clergy, and laypeople—from Anglican dioceses around the world to talk about mission.45 More than sixteen thousand people packed Maple Leaf Gardens for the opening service, which was broadcast on television the next day. The Anglican Congress crystalized the growing discomfort with what was seen to be a programmatic and paternalistic kind of mission, where people from developed nations did the teaching and organizing while others did the listening and obeying. The new vision was “mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ,” which came to be called MRI. The primates and metropolitans of the

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anglicans in canada Anglican Communion met for two weeks before the congress in London, Ontario, and put together a statement on MRI (Document 7). Their hope was that Anglicans would make mission an international partnership. In the short run, MRI had exciting results for the Anglican Church of Canada. A campaign was launched to raise $1 million for a world mission fund. In 1968 Canadian bishops joined with other Anglican bishops worldwide at a Lambeth Conference in England to discuss how MRI might be institutionalized. In 1973 Canadian delegates to a new Anglican international structure, the Anglican Consultative Council, helped establish the Partners in Mission Program, which has been at the heart of Canadian Anglican mission programming ever since. Its principle was that “there is but one mission in all the world,” shared by the “world-wide Christian community.” In theory, Partners in Mission meant that member churches of the Anglican Communion would identify mission priorities together in partnership. In common practice, Anglican officials in “have-not” countries proposed projects for which Anglican officials in “have” countries found resources. “Only a few key people determine the needs of a Province,” some complained at a meeting of the Anglican Consultive Council at Huron College, London, Ontario, in 1977.46 There was also a modest “volunteers in mission” program, begun in 1986, whereby persons could serve overseas at their own expense for a year or two at the invitation of an Anglican partner church. And many Canadian dioceses partnered with overseas dioceses. Officially, the idea of mission as missio (“sending”) was gone; mission was invited and negotiated. Much good was done, and in Canada the process was well administered by committed and knowledgeable people. In the long run, however, most Anglican parishes lost their global consciousness. “Being open to one another is difficult,” acknowledged the Anglican Consultative Council at Singapore in 1987, “as churches assume more and more responsibility for their own lives.”47 Missionary work came to be seen in most parishes (if it was seen at all) as volunteers doing small tasks in exotic countries that had large spiders or as head-office administrators making decisions about funding through top-heavy international consultative processes, all remote from congregational life. Moreover, Partners in Mission had little room for ecumenical cooperation, a hallmark of the old missionary movement, because the Anglican Consultative Council had essentially defined all mission as Anglican partnership. Without foreign mission in the old sense, the Church began to use the term mission in a secularizing way to mean the broad purposes that an organization exists to accomplish. Thus in 1971 when the Program Committee told General Synod that “the Church exists for mission,” it used the term to mean “social, educational, or evangelical ministry, . . . whether it be close at hand or in remote places.”48 If Canadian Anglican leaders decided against old approaches to witnessing and serving the Gospel, less prominent Anglicans sometimes thought otherwise.

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questions about missionary work The question of how the Church should be a missionary organization was too important to be decided once and for all. As in the 1880s, when evangelicals frustrated with the Church’s official missionary society created their own, so Canadian Anglican evangelicals in the 1960s increasingly gave their energies and gifts to what the Partners in Mission office came to call Independent Mission Agencies (IMAs). Perhaps the most conspicuous Anglican IMA was the Canadian branch, formally organized in 1979, of the South American Mission Society. In the convening circular of General Synod for 1989, disgruntled PIM officials saw little place for “the luxury of diverse, and at times divergent, philosophies” of a variety of mission organizations, much as supporters of the SPG had complained almost two centuries earlier about the CMS. Increasingly, Anglican mission after the 1960s emerged locally and informally under the radar screen of Partners in Mission. Several Anglican parish churches sponsored their own missionaries. Other Anglican parishes undertook shortterm work projects in developing nations. Overseas Anglican theological students studying in Canada formed contacts that later blossomed into mission relationships. As the twenty-first century dawned, there were numerous uncoordinated ways in which Canadian Anglicans supported missionary work of various descriptions. Faced with a similar situation, the Episcopal Church in the United States instituted the Episcopal Partnership for Global Mission in 2000 to bring together people who had different answers to the question of how to be a missionary Church. No such organization existed in Canada.

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The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF), originally the Primate’s World Relief Fund, is now frequently seen as an instrument of church mission although it is independent of Partners in Mission and began in the social service work of General Synod in 1959. Responding to emergencies in Canada and around the world and carrying on a consistent international program of local development, it became the most visible instrument of overseas ministry in the Anglican Church. It also built an enviable reputation for effectiveness and accountability. But although Anglicans agreed that they should help the less fortunate, they did not all endorse the Primate’s Fund. The most prominent critic of its theology, spirit, and strategy was George Luxton (1901–70), the bishop of Huron, who in 1969 publicly objected that it “does not present clearly to God’s World, and to the two-thirds of humanity in hunger, what the [Lambeth] Conference described as ‘the Servant Church.’”49 In response, his diocese created a program of its own, the “Huron Hunger Fund Committee,” which initially raised its own funds, administered its own educational programs, and chose its own projects. It gradually found ways to cooperate with the Primate’s Fund and since 1994 has operated as its diocesan extension.

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anglicans in canada The Primate’s Fund also experienced disputes over territory with independent and non-Anglican development organizations. Its most serious although unintended rival was World Vision, whose Canadian branch was organized in 1957. As it happened, a very significant proportion of World Vision’s leaders and contributors were Anglican. In October 1999 the director of PWRDF, in a letter published in the Anglican Journal, asked that newspaper to exclude all advertising from World Vision as a matter of policy. Was it disloyal for Anglicans to support good works outside an Anglican environment? Here, too, debates about mission pointed to underlying questions of Anglican identity.

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Anglicans and the First Nations In 1965 a group of representatives from the four major departments of General Synod, none of them aboriginal, prepared a report that identified “a totally new situation” in native ministry: “The Indian people . . . are claiming the right to have a much greater say in shaping their own destiny.” Perhaps the new situation was not that Indian people were speaking but that white people were listening. In any event, General Synod mandated the interdepartmental committee to consult with aboriginals and prepare new policies. It reported in 1967 that it needed funds to commission a research study. That request was granted, and Charles Hendry, director of the School of Social Work at the University of Toronto, was hired to produce what came to be called the “Hendry Report” (its actual title was Beyond Traplines).50 An abstract was circulated before the report was published, consultations were held across the country, and the recommendations were approved at General Synod in 1969. The interests of the author inevitably determined the conclusions of the 102page report. Hendry’s values were modern and scientific. What was essential in dealing with the Indians, he believed, was knowledge of social science, with its “unbiased, honest, and objective” methodology, in apparent distinction from the biased, dishonest, and subjective methods of lesser disciplines.51 Hendry urged the Church to support social work and community development among native people and use its political clout (which in 1969 many still thought it had) to force governments to treat them justly. The report conceived solutions as coming from the top down. The author had nothing to say about what aboriginal Christians could offer other Christians from their spirituality, theology, culture, worship, understanding of community, or models of pastoral care, of which Hendry himself had very little personal experience. He spoke of Indians as if they were not really part of the Church but rather an external group that the Church could service. Many Anglicans endorsed Hendry’s perspective. In the short term, the report provided a rationale for the Church to withdraw from the Indian residential school system and generated conversation about the future of native ministry. But Hendry’s paternalistic portrait of Canadian Anglican Indians as

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questions about missionary work outsiders in their own Church was not a promising foundation for the future. In 1988 Canadian Anglican aboriginals succeeded in persuading General Synod that they wanted to be accepted as fellow Anglicans with gifts and wisdom to offer. In that year the Sub-Committee on Native Affairs became the Council for Native Ministries, and later the Council of Indigenous Anglicans. The first National Native Convocation was held in 1988, with further convocations in 1993 and 1997. The Church’s first native bishop, Charles Arthurson, was elected for the diocese of Saskatchewan in 1989, and other native bishops were elected in 1993 and 1996. It was helpful that the new primate, Michael Peers, had been bishop of Qu’Appelle in Saskatchewan and had firsthand experience of native ministry. Unlike Hendry, who had written about the Church as an organization of white persons making decisions and rendering services for red persons, Peers and his colleagues saw it as a multicultural organization in which diverse voices could speak and be heard. On that basis the Church participated in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which reported to the government in 1996 with well over four hundred recommendations, most of which are still ignored at this writing. The report affirmed, “Of all the non-governmental institutions in Canadian society, religious institutions have perhaps the greatest potential to foster awareness and understanding between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. This potential exists even though the Christian churches’ historical role was often that of supporting the dominant society and contributing to the marginalization of Aboriginal people.”52 In 2000 there were 225 congregations of indigenous Anglicans.

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The End of Indian Residential Schools As Anglicans were revising their ideas about foreign mission between the 1940s and the 1960s, so, too, were they revisiting Indian residential schools. The Canadian government was also increasingly embarrassed by the schools, which were expensive, unpopular, and, in the light of day, philosophically distasteful. In 1968 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a vigorous opponent of what would later be called “special status” for any people within Canada, was elected prime minister. His Liberal government determined to download Indian schooling to the provinces. At first the most pressing problem with the schools was that they involved collaboration between church and state, which in a post-Christian age was an anachronism. In 1966 the Canadian Labour Relations Board decided that the staff of residential schools should be employees of the Crown, and in 1968 it was decided that they should be eligible for collective bargaining rights. After delicate negotiations, the government reached an agreement with the denominations that as of April 1, 1969, all Indian residential school staff were to come under the Public Service Employment Act. As of that date, the Department of Indian Affairs would accept full responsibility for the schools. Because in practice such

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anglicans in canada an abrupt transition would thoroughly disrupt the schools, the government agreed to extend the contracts of denominational administrators. It also exempted child-care workers and school chaplains from the order. The federal government closed most of the schools by the mid-1970s, although seven were still open in the 1980s. The last federal Indian residential school to close was in Saskatchewan in 1996.

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The Indian Residential Schools Lawsuits The schools administered by the Anglican Church, the United Church of Canada, the Presbyterian Church, and various Roman Catholic religious orders employed some staff members who crossed well beyond the stern boarding school discipline that was common in earlier days and into the sphere of serious physical and emotional abuse. Moreover, a number of them were sexual predators. These teachers and staff members caused suffering and damage beyond description. Historians have found evidence that children were mistreated in the schools for decades, perhaps from the beginning. Samuel Blake had found evidence of negligence and abuse in 1908 (Document 5); in 1913 litigation against the Mohawk Institute in Brantford was partially successful.53 During the 1990s, many victims began to come forward to tell their stories. Where their abusers were also still living, the Crown prosecuted the cases. Many victims also filed lawsuits.54 Typically, a lawsuit had four parties: one or more plaintiffs, and, as defendants, the perpetrator (if he or she were living), the denominational authority that managed the school, and the government of Canada. Where the lawsuit named only the perpetrator and the government, the practice of the government was to name the Church as a third party in order, its lawyers said, to ensure that all the facts were discovered but also, of course, to share liability. Generally, the churches claimed that Canada was largely responsible for the schools because it owned them, funded them, regulated them, and supplied them with students. Canada claimed that the churches were largely responsible because they administered them, hired a staff, and created the daily ethos. Courts ruled in the few cases that had been decided by 2003 that the partnership between the churches and Department of Indian Affairs was so close, and the lines of accountability were so murky, that they must be held jointly (although not necessarily equally) liable. The legal processes were typically daunting and painful for the plaintiffs, who were brought into a foreign and adversarial setting, obliged to dredge up ugly memories, and sometimes subjected to hours of ruthless cross-examination. They had to undergo psychological testing and interviews that the defendants hoped would prove they had not been much damaged by their experiences. Perhaps a more humane approach to the claims, supported by the Anglican Church, involved alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms,

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questions about missionary work which if constructed creatively, might have a less adversarial ethos. But some native people contended that ADR could be as offensive as litigation. These cases multiplied so dramatically as to put at risk the financial viability of General Synod. In July 2002 the Anglican Church of Canada reported that Anglican entities such as General Synod, the MSCC, and several dioceses were facing at least 1,350 claimants alleging abuse. That figure excluded potential class actions. General Synod was spending about $100,000 a month on the expenses of research and legal defense. Anglican officials avoided estimating the prospective financial liability publicly, and judicial awards of damages could not be predicted. A reasonable inference from published data, however, would put it in excess of $200 million. Because the total assets of General Synod, excepting pension and other trust funds, which were legally protected, were approximately $11 million, and because its annual operating budget was approximately $10 million, it seemed quite possible that the national structure of the Anglican Church would be forced into insolvency. Some operations of the national Church, such as the PWRDF and the archives, sought independent incorporation in the hope of surviving the bankruptcy of General Synod. In addition, some poorer dioceses faced financial jeopardy. The diocese of Cariboo in British Columbia, with only seventeen parishes and five thousand Anglicans, ceased operations on December 31, 2001. Because many of the Church’s costs resulted from government action, Anglican officials entered into a series of negotiations with federal officials in 1999, sometimes bilaterally and sometimes with ecumenical partners. Discussions were frequently slow and frustrating, but in November 2002 an agreement was announced, upon the condition of approval by General Synod and all thirty dioceses (not just the dioceses in which residential schools had been located). That condition was met in February 2003. The government agreed to cap the liability of the Anglican Church in cases involving abuse at $25 million. Furthermore, the government agreed to cover the legal costs of verifying claims. The agreement explicitly excluded liability for damages for social and cultural deprivation, a cause broached by some lawyers but not yet recognized in Canadian law. Many indigenous Anglicans felt excluded from the Church’s negotiations with the government. In March 2003 the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples disowned the agreement, particularly criticizing the ADR process and the “requirement of survivors to waive all future claims for loss of language and culture in order to gain a settlement for physical and sexual abuse.”55 Nevertheless, the primate signed the agreement, and the dioceses began raising $25 million to cover the Church’s liability in Indian residential school abuse. The largest mission campaign in the history of the Anglican Church of Canada would not launch any new missions; it would meet liabilities incurred in old ones. Whether it was thereby honoring its mission or betraying it was a new debate within a long-standing controversial theme.

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Two Legal Cases Residential school cases are tried under provincial law, which varies considerably across the country. Of the very few cases that had been decided by the summer of 2003, two were notable. Both were decided in British Columbia. In Blackwater v. Plint, damages were sought for a large number of egregious physical and sexual assaults on plaintiffs while they were pupils at a United Church Indian residential school in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Some of the assaults had been committed as far back as the 1940s. The facts were undisputed. The decision in the third and final phase was given by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in July 2001 but was substantially changed by the provincial Court of Appeal in December 2003. The plaintiffs had charged Canada and the United Church with negligence, but the Court ruled that there was no evidence that either Canada or the Church knew or should have known of the abuse. The plaintiffs had then charged breach of fiduciary duty, but the Court ruled that the defendants had not acted dishonestly or for personal advantage. The plaintiffs had next charged breach of statutory duty under the Indian Act. Canada argued that it had delegated its duty under the act to the churches, but the Court held that it did not have power to delegate its statutory duty and that, in fact, under the sweeping powers of the Indian Act it had owed a duty of special diligence that it had failed to discharge. Finally, the plaintiffs had charged the government and Church with vicarious liability. Vicarious liability could arise when an employer in an enterprise that put others at risk gave an employee a high degree of authority over a vulnerable person should the employee commit harmful acts closely connected with that authority. Sexual abuse committed by a dormitory supervisor on a child was a perfect example. The Court allocated 75 percent of the damages in the case against the government and 25 percent against the United Church. The Court of Appeal, however, decided unanimously to release the Church from all liability, largely on the ground that, except in religious matters, its managerial discretion at the school had been “closely fettered” by Canada’s authority.”56 The first residential school trial involving the Anglican Church was Mowatt v. Clarke et al., which the Supreme Court of British Columbia decided in March 2000. In 1969 an Indian agent sent Floyd Mowatt, eight years old, to St. George’s Indian Residential School in Lytton. While there, he came under the control of Derek Clarke, a dormitory supervisor. Clarke sodomized and assaulted Mowatt for two years. Five other former students testified at trial that Clarke had abused them as well. A teacher at a local school heard reports of Clarke’s behavior, and as a result the principal of St. George’s agreed to interview Mowatt. He took notes and promised to inform the authorities but failed to do so. Instead, he forced Clarke to resign in 1973. In addition to the principal, it appears that several others knew what was happening, including the local Anglican priest, the principal of the local public school, the bishop, several teachers in town, and several members

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questions about missionary work of the local Anglican parish. None informed the police, the department of Indian Affairs, or the parents, and none cared for the child. Clarke received a job reference on his way out the door and did damage elsewhere. He pleaded guilty to his crimes in 1993 and was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. In this case, too, the Court found Church and government vicariously liable for damages, but it found other kinds of liability as well. The Court found both defendants negligent in their duty of care, for which the standard was properly that of a prudent parent. It found that they both failed to provide proper supervision for their employees and proper protection for the child. The Church was more liable (60 percent) because, by hiding the injury from the government, it prevented the government from caring for the child. In addition, the Court found that the Church breached its fiduciary duty to Mowatt because its agent, the principal of St. George’s, undertook to bring the matter to the authorities but failed to do so. In covering up the crimes, the Court ruled, the principal (no longer living) aimed to secure a personal advantage. He hoped to prevent an investigation into St. George’s, which might have undermined his authority there and might also have led to the revelation that he himself was a child abuser. The government did not share in this liability. The amount of the Court’s award was secret. The Anglican Church appealed this decision to the British Columbia Court of Appeals on the grounds that the trial court had underestimated the liability of the government. As of July 2003 no decision had been rendered. In 1993 the primate, Michael Peers, apologized at the second National Native Convocation for the failures of the residential schools (Document 8). At General Synod 2001, Gordon Beardy, the first native Canadian to be elected a diocesan bishop, in an unexpected and unplanned act accepted the apology and forgave the primate and the Church on behalf of his people. As always, Anglicans disagreed about the apology. Perhaps it was too little, too late. Perhaps it was too much, too soon. Perhaps Peers jeopardized the Church’s legal defense. Perhaps the Church should not be defending itself in the first place. Perhaps the Church should be proud of its past and supportive of its faithful workers. Perhaps the Church should model repentance.

Conclusion From the planting of their first congregation in St. John’s, Canadian Anglicans recognized themselves as part of the global mission story of the Church. For nearly 250 years they were beneficiaries of missionary societies, principally connected with the Church of England. From the 1880s to the 1960s they were sponsors of mission. After the 1960s they were partners in mission. At all times they agreed that mission was vital but disagreed about what it should include and how it should be done. Should Anglicans in one part of the country support missions in another? What missions should they support overseas? Should Anglicans send missionaries to convert non-Christians? Should they try to

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anglicans in canada change the views of other Christians? Should they take the initiative to identify missionary needs or only respond to invitations extended by others? Should they minister to members of the First Nations? Should they apologize and make reparations when missions went wrong? Conversations about these questions from generation to generation have been remarkably similar even though contexts have changed. Some have regarded mission as a priority while others have not. Some have thought that self-interest, paternalism, or cultural ideology fatally tainted missionary activity while others disagreed or made allowances or suggested reforms. Some have thought that educating First Nations children was never the Church’s responsibility; others thought that it was but should have been approached differently; still others argued that the real problems, although regrettable, were created by a small minority. Anglicans today—whether indigenous or non-indigenous— remain in disagreement over the extent to which native spirituality can be incorporated into Anglican tradition, whether First Nations Anglicans should have their own indigenized Christian life and ministry or be part of a churchwide life and ministry, and other, similar issues that were already being discussed in the days of John West. A historian who focuses on decisions of Church judicatories will see many clear changes in policy. A historian who focuses on the conversations of Anglicans, however, will see striking continuities in questions raised and disagreements voiced from generation to generation. Focusing on Church officialdom in 1910, for example, we see a strong policy of support for schools, but we know from articulate Anglicans such as S. H. Blake that ministry to the First Nations was being sharply debated in ways that would be familiar to Anglicans ninety years later. Focusing on Church officialdom in 1980, we see a distinct coolness toward cross-cultural evangelization, but if we broaden our perspective to include Anglicans in the South American Mission Society we will recognize the familiar contours of a very old conversation about Christianity and other religions. In the early 2000s, as in the 1860s, Anglicans were debating the premises, goals, and strategies of their mission work as part of their wider debate about Anglican identity. The character of Anglican Christianity is to be sought not in the changing policies of Church judicatories but in the historical disagreements of Anglicans, which have continued into the present.

Notes 1. J. P. Francis, “Robert Wolfall,” JCCHS 11 (1969): 2–32. 2. Daniel O’Connor et al., Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000 (New York: Continuum, 2000); Charles F. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G.: An Historical Account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1900, Based on a Digest of the Society’s Records (London: SPG, 1901); H. P. Thompson, Into All Lands: The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1954 (London: SPCK, 1951); Hans Cnattingius, Bishops and Societies: A Study of American Colonial and Missionary Expansion, 1698–1850 (London: SPCK, 1952).

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questions about missionary work 3. Reprinted in David Humphreys, An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Containing Their Foundation, Proceedings, and the Success of Their Missionaries in the British Colonies, to the Year 1718 (London: Joseph Downing, 1730), xv–xxxi. 4. Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley, eds., The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society: Its Environment, Its Men, and Its Work, 3 vols. (London: CMS, 1899), available as Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (hereafter CIHM), Ottawa, no. 16213–7. 5. Stock, History of the Church Missionary Society, 134. 6. DCB 7: 900–903; Arthur N. Thompson, “John West,” JCCHS 12 (1970): 44–57. 7. Kenneth Coates, “‘Send Only Those Who Rise a Peg’: Anglican Clergy in the Yukon, 1858– 1932,” JCCHS 28 (1986): 3–18, quotation on 4, quoting C. P. Williams. 8. Frits Pannekoek, A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance of 1869–1879 (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1991) and bibliography cited there. 9. John Webster Grant, Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter since 1534 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). 10. W. F. Payton, An Historical Sketch of the Diocese of Saskatchewan of the Anglican Church of Canada (n.p.: 1974?), 27. 11. Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 263. 12. DCB 9: 626–27. 13. The following articles appeared together in a number of JCCHS largely devoted to Henry Budd: George Van Der Goes Ladd, “Going-Up-The-Hill: The Journey of Henry Budd,” JCCHS 33 (1991): 7–22; Frank A. Peake, “Henry Budd and His Colleagues,” JCCHS 33 (1991): 23–40; Katherine Pettipas, “‘The Praying Chief’: The Reverend Henry Budd,” JCCHS 33 (1991): 41–50. 14. A. C. Garricoh and Isaac Stringer, “Robert McDonald,” in Leaders of the Canadian Church, ed. William Bertal Heeney, 3 vols. (Toronto: Musson, [1918]-43), 2: 111–32; F. A. Peake, “Robert McDonald (1829–1913),” JCCHS 17 (1975): 54–71. 15. John S. Long, “John Horden, First Bishop of Moosonee,” JCCHS 27 (1985): 86–97, quotation on 94. 16. Philip Carrington, The Anglican Church in Canada: A History (Toronto: Collins, 1963), 255. A short biography of Ahenakew, noting examples of the bigotry that he endured, is included in the editor’s introduction to the posthumously published Edward Ahenakew, Voices of the Plains Cree, ed. Ruth M. Black (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973). 17. Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 262. 18. For Codner, see DCB 8: 164–67; for Spencer, see DCB 10: 663–65; for Feild, see DCB 10: 278–81; see also H. A. Seegmiller, “The Colonial and Continental Church Society in Eastern North America,” D.D. thesis, 1964, General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, Toronto. 19. For Willoughby, see DCB 7: 914–15; for Bond, see DCB 13: 94–98. 20. DCB 13: 461–64. 21. Lloyd’s version is given in most Anglican sources; the alternative view is in Helen Evans Reid, All Silent, All Damned: The Search for Isaac Barr (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969). 22. W. O. B. Allen and Edmund McClure, Two Hundred Years: The History of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1698–1898 (London: SPCK, 1898). 23. Peake, British Columbia; for Hills’s biography, see DCB 12: 440–43.

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anglicans in canada 24. DCB 14: 316–19, and bibliography cited there. 25. Robert Merrill Black, “A Crippled Crusade: Anglican Missions to French-Canadian Roman Catholics in Lower Canada, 1835 to 1868,” Th.D. thesis, Trinity College, Toronto, 1989. 26. Maurice R. Kingsford, “Church Societies,” JCCHS 7 (1965): 3–34. 27. DCB 8: 171–74. 28. Kingsford, “Church Societies,” 15. 29. Ernest Hawkins, quoted in Thomas R. Millman and A. R. Kelley, Atlantic Canada to 1900: A History of the Anglican Church (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1983), 76. 30. Thomas R. Millman, “The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, 1883–1902,” JCCHS 19 (1977): 166–176. 31. DCB 11: 313–15. 32. DCB 12: 1000–1001. 33. Quoted in Millman, “The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Church,” 174. 34. [Robert Machray], Life of Robert Machray, Archbishop of Rupert’s Land, Primate of All Canada, Prelate of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (Toronto: Macmillan, 1909), 435; John Irwin Cooper, The Blessed Communion: The Origins and History of the Diocese of Montreal, 1760–1960 (Montreal: Archives Committee of the Diocese of Montreal, 1960), 118. 35. Payton, Saskatchewan, 55. 36. Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 115, 174. 37. Cecil Swanson, The Days of My Sojourning: A Reminiscence (Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute, 1977), 36. 38. L. F. S. Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothucks of Newfoundland,” Canadian Historican Review 58 (1977): 133–53. 39. Breaking the Silence: An Interpretive Study of Residential School Impact as Illustrated by the Stories of First Nations Individuals (Ottawa: Assembly of First Nations, 1994); James Rodger Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999). 40. Nicholas Flood Davin, Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds (Ottawa? 1879?), available as CIHM no. 03651. 41. DCB 14: 85–89. 42. “Ethnohistory Issue,” JCCHS 26 (Oct. 1984): 43–95. 43. Cyril Powles, “Canada’s Contribution to the Building of the Nippon Seikokai, 1873– 1900,” JCCHS 7 (1965): 37–48. 44. Richard Ruggle, “The Beginnings of the Diocese of Honan,” JCCHS 14 (1972): 83–95. 45. Anglican Congress 1963, Toronto, Report of Proceedings, ed. Eugene R. Fairweather (Toronto: Editorial Committee, Anglican Congress, 1963). 46. Anglican Consultative Council, ACC-4 (London: for the Council, 1979), 25–26. 47. [Anglican Consultative Council], Many Gifts, One Spirit: Report of ACC-7: Singapore 1987 (London: Church House Publishing, 1987), 29. 48. General Synod Journal (1971), 208. 49. Huron Synod Journal (1969): 95. 50. “The Ministry of the Anglican Church of Canada with Canadian Indians,” GSJ (1965): 391–97, quotation on 395; Charles E. Hendry, Beyond Traplines: Does the Church Really Care? Towards an Assessment of the Work of the Anglican Church of Canada with Canada’s Native

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Peoples (Toronto: Anglican Church of Canada, 1969), reprinted with a new appendix (Toronto: Anglican Church of Canada, 1998). 51. Hendry, Beyond Traplines, 26, 31. 52. Canada Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 5 vols. (Ottawa: The Commission, 1996), 5: 97. 53. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, 357–58. 54. For this more recent information, the Web-sites of the denominations, British Columbia court system, Supreme Court of Canada, Native Law Center of the University of Saskatchewan, and links provided from them have been invaluable. 55. Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples press release, March 14, 2003. Accessed July 15, 2003, at . 56. The decision is at .

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chapter 2

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Questions about the Church’s Role in Society Anglicans in British North America (BNA) and later Canada prayed for their government and their community and saw their Church as a vital instrument of God’s purposes for the world. But they had diverse and sometimes conflicting views about the social good, and they disagreed about the proper role of the Anglican Church in Canadian society. The Anglican Church in BNA contributed to society in very substantial ways. It gave Christian teaching and moral direction, ran schools and hospitals, administered social services and homes for the marginalized, integrated diverse populations, formed people for responsible citizenship, and advised governments and corporations on topical issues as well as general policy. Were all these tasks equally legitimate and important? What did they entail, and how should they be undertaken? Who should pay for them? And, given that society received so many benefits from the Anglican Church, how should it support the Church in return? Until the 1850s the Anglican Church was the privileged religious group in anglophone BNA and was even established by statute in three provinces. Anglicans discussed and debated whether their Church, compared with other communions, should receive a special measure of gratitude and financial assistance and wield particular social and political influence. A new period began with the 1860s, when, legally, the Anglican Church became only one Christian denomination among others. Still, because Canada continued to see itself as very much a Christian country until the 1960s, all mainline churches continued to enjoy social importance. Should churches continue to be privileged over other civic, charitable, and fraternal organizations? And what was the proper role of the Anglican Church in Christian Canada alongside other denominations of equal legal status? Should it still enjoy a few distinctions in view of its special relationship to the established Church of the mother country and its historic contributions to the development of Canada?

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questions about the church in society With the 1960s, the various levels of government of Canada and the business world increasingly found it poor policy and bad strategy to favor Christianity, and politicians and corporate executives no longer looked to the churches for advice. But even if the Church’s influence was diminishing in society, God continued to be a God of justice and mercy. The old question of the proper role of the Anglican Church in society remained pertinent but was now shaped by a “post-Christian” context. Thus Anglican Christians in each of these three periods discussed how the Church should relate to the government; what approach it should take to topical issues; how it should contribute to the social welfare; what (if any) privileges it should enjoy; and, in general, what its role in society should be. In each period, Anglicans differed among themselves and with others.

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The Establishment in the Atlantic Provinces of BNA In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1557–1603) it was already widely accepted that the Church of England should be established in Britain’s overseas colonies except for those that came under the control of chartered private proprietors who were not Anglican. “Britain’s oldest colony” of Newfoundland became the first overseas example of the “English” model of Anglicanism. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who took possession of the island in 1583 by the authority of the queen, ordained a law “for Religion, which in publique exercise should be according to the Church of England.” Gilbert’s settlement did not survive. Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, followed by other English colonies in America and elsewhere, established the Church of England more successfully. When the first colonial assembly for Nova Scotia was convened in 1758, it passed a statute establishing the Church of England (Document 9). Another act of the following year made the churchwardens and vestry of St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, a parish corporation and authorized the churchwardens to collect church rates from parishioners.1 The Act of 1758 recognized the rights of Protestant “dissenters” and relieved them from paying Anglican Church rates. Roman Catholics, however, were treated with severity, in part because Protestants were sharply hostile to “popery” and also because Nova Scotia officialdom was suspicious of the French-speaking, Roman Catholic acadiens. In 1755 Gov. Charles Lawrence of Nova Scotia had begun the expulsion of ten thousand acadiens from their homes. In the Province of New Brunswick, too, which was carved out of Nova Scotia in 1784, the Church of England was established by the first legislature of 1786. The language of the act resembled the one for Nova Scotia. A similar act of establishment was passed in 1803 in Prince Edward Island. But for years before that, the government had been paying the stipend of Theophilus Desbrisay, the Anglican minister at Charlottetown, whose father, as it happened, was for a while the lieutenant governor. Neither New Brunswick nor Prince Edward Island fol-

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anglicans in canada lowed Nova Scotia in authorizing churchwardens to impose Church rates on their parishioners. These were the only three provinces in what is now Canada where the Church was formally established by law, although their Church establishments were neither carefully defined nor vigorously enforced. The Church of England sometimes seemed established in Newfoundland and was often there as elsewhere colloquially called the “established Church,” but legally it was not.

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Establishment in Quebec In the years that the Maritime Provinces were establishing the Anglican Church, many British and colonial leaders would also have loved a Church establishment in the “old” Province of Quebec. This huge territory, including present-day Ontario as well as present-day Quebec, was transferred from France to Britain in 1763 by the Treaty of Paris. The first set of royal instructions to the first English civil governor, Sir James Murray, stated an intention “that the Church of England may be established both in Principle and Practice” (Document 10). Indeed, in every succeeding set of royal instructions through 1786 the British government repeated its desire to promote Anglican interests politically and financially. Neither Murray nor his successor, Sir Guy Carleton, paid much attention to the religious parts of their instructions. In these years, only a fewscore Anglican settlers lived in the entire colony. Moreover, neither Murray nor Carleton cared to treat the French-speaking, Roman Catholic canadiens in the brutal way that Governor Lawrence had treated the acadiens a few years earlier. In fact, Carleton personally drafted the Quebec Act of 1774, which not only granted canadiens a degree of religious toleration unknown in the mother country or in Ireland but also restored to the Roman Catholic Church its historic rights as a landed seigneur and its powers to collect tithes. As a result, the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec resembled an established church, a circumstance that would persistently annoy the first Anglican bishop.

The Loyalists Many Americans, called “loyalists,” who opposed the American Revolution of 1776–83 and maintained allegiance to the British Crown found it necessary or advisable to flee their homes either during or after the war. Before signing the peace treaty, the British government decided to compensate loyalists with generous grants of land in the loyal provinces of BNA. About thirty thousand settled in the colony of Nova Scotia, more than doubling its population. Nearly two thousand moved to what would soon be called Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), joining a few hundred anglophones and about seventy thousand fran-

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questions about the church in society cophones. Perhaps 7,500 immigrated to Upper Canada (present-day Ontario), where almost no Europeans or Americans had previously settled. Many went to Britain or to other colonies. Many loyalists were Anglican, and among these some brought with them the English, establishmentarian model of Anglicanism, while others, probably the majority, brought the American, denominational model of Anglicanism. The clergy sent from England by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), however, usually preferred the English model, at least until the 1830s. Theirs was loyalism in the full philosophical sense, as opposed to the mere political sense of preferring life under the British Crown to life in the American Republic. Colonial government officials, as Tory appointees, generally tended in this direction, too, except that in Lower Canada they also recognized the political dangers of privileging a minority religious group in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic province. An excellent representative of the English model in its purest form was the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada. John Graves Simcoe (1752– 1806), who had commanded a loyalist corps during the American Revolution, argued vigorously with his superiors in London that Upper Canada should have an Anglican Church establishment and its own Anglican bishop. He expressed some of his thoughts on the matter in 1792 in a letter to Henry Dundas in the British Colonial Office (Document 11). His arguments had no success. One of Simcoe’s critics was Richard Cartwright (1759–1815), a refugee from Albany, New York, who settled in Kingston. He was a brilliant entrepreneur whose merchandising, milling, fur trading, shipping, import-export, and other interests in Kingston and Napanee made him one of the key players in the burgeoning St. Lawrence commercial empire.2 Like many other Anglican businesspeople, professionals, farmers, and laborers who had been compelled by circumstances to flee the United States, he appreciated the American experience of working, studying, and socializing with people of different religious persuasions. He recognized that it was one thing to establish the Church of England in the mother country, where the overwhelming majority of citizens were Anglicans, but quite another thing to try to establish it in a colony where Anglicans were in a distinct minority. In 1794 he wrote of Governor Simcoe and his views of Church establishment: I do not doubt the disposition of the Governor to consult the welfare of the Province, yet this disposition sometimes puts on an odd appearance. He is a man of warm and sanguine temper, that will not let him see any obstacles to his views; he thinks every existing regulation in England would be proper here. Not attending sufficiently, perhaps, to the spirit of the constitution, he seems bent on copying all the subordinate establishments without considering the great disparity of the two countries in every respect. And it really would not surprise me to see attempts made to establish among us Ecclesiastical Courts, tithes, and religious tests, though nine-tenths at least of our people are of per-

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anglicans in canada suasions different from the Church of England, though the whole have been bred in a country where there was the most perfect freedom in religious matters, and though this would certainly occasion almost a general emigration.3

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The Loyalist Version of the English Model The English model of Church establishment, although never fully realized, guided the policies and strategies of Canadian Anglican leaders in the generation or two after 1780. For them, it was a good principle both theologically and constitutionally, but it was also an essential political bulwark against the American republicanism next door. Many had experienced that republicanism at its worst during the American Revolution. They had been spied on by committees of correspondence, harassed and beaten and tarred and feathered by mobs, attainted of crimes in absentia by unaccountable popular assemblies, and plundered of property by militias. They had been persecuted for their peacefully expressed religious convictions and had escaped with very little of their property, in the face of great hardship, to the northern colonies. They had experienced firsthand the ruthlessness of irreligion, and now, in Britain’s second American empire, they believed that for the sake of security, peace, and justice they must work hard to preserve monarchy and the established Church. Their model of a Church establishment was built on three premises. First, the Church of England was the best of churches because its teaching was more purely evangelical, its liturgy was more purely catholic, and its order was more purely apostolic than any other. Being several cuts above the competition, it deserved special privileges in the new colonies. Second, the established Church of England, as an essential part of the English constitution with the king as its supreme governor, was especially suited to forming fit British citizens. Third, because the Church helped society, society should be helpful to the Church. Britain might well have kept its thirteen older colonies had it given more generous support to the colonial Anglican Church. It should learn from its errors in the past. It should protect, promote, and fund the Church of England in what was left of BNA. For a great many years after the Revolutionary War, these Canadian Anglican leaders regarded the Whiggish Episcopal system south of the border as malformed. Its defects included an overly influential laity, shockingly weak bishops, a republican style of governance, and excessive flexibility in theological orthodoxy.

Charles Inglis The most important of the loyalist Anglican leaders in Canada was Charles Inglis (1734–1816), born in County Donegal, Ireland, into an Anglican clergy family.4 He apparently could not afford to attend Trinity College, Dublin, as his older

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questions about the church in society brother had done, and so in 1753 or 1754 he sailed to Philadelphia, where he found work as a teacher. He studied privately for ordination and returned to London in 1758 to be made deacon and priest. The SPG sent him as a missionary to Dover, Delaware, where he served six years. There he won a reputation as an effective evangelical preacher, and, unlike most SPG clergy, a friend of Methodists. In 1764 Inglis accepted an appointment as assistant rector at Trinity Church, New York, the largest, wealthiest, and most influential Anglican church in the colonies north of Charleston. The rector himself was not eager for an assistant so evangelically disposed, but the vestry felt differently, and American Anglican vestries were powerful. Just at this time, Inglis’s wife died, eight months pregnant. He remarried in 1773, and through his wealthy new wife he became financially comfortable (albeit more temporarily than he could have expected) with property estimated at £10,000. Inglis’s best biographer surmises that under the influence of the Anglican intellectuals of New York, particularly those of King’s College (now Columbia University), his theology moved toward a more high-church position. In politics he was, before 1776, a moderate Whig with a conscientious aversion to outright armed rebellion, especially over trifling causes. The Declaration of Independence of July 1776 polarized the politics of the day. In September 1776 Trinity Church was burned to the ground along with about a quarter of the rest of New York City. The rumor was that the culprits were some of George Washington’s soldiers. That incident, along with stories of maltreatment of loyalist Anglicans by the rebels, firmed Inglis’s convictions toward loyalism. He wrote and spoke openly—and at considerable risk—against the Revolution. He delivered one of his sermons (Document 12) at the commemoration of the martyrdom of King Charles I, an earlier monarch who had endured the ingratitude and indignity of rebellion. In 1777 the rector of Trinity died, and the vestry appointed Inglis the new rector, making him the senior colonial cleric of the Church of England. In 1779 the state of New York attainted Inglis and his wife of high treason and confiscated and sold all their property. And in August 1782 Inglis was shocked to hear that the British had abandoned the loyalists and granted independence to the United States. Nor would Britain press for reparations for loyalist losses. Inglis recognized that to continue in New York without citizenship or property, and marked as a traitor, would be impossible. He remained in New York City only so long as the British continued to control it, which they did for the thirteen months between the truce and the peace treaty of September 1783. Then, not long after the death of his second wife, he set sail to Britain. Throughout their history Anglicans have been divided over the issues of the day, but the American Revolution put Anglican unity to one of its severest tests. In May 1783 Inglis wrote in irenic spirit to William White, an Anglican priest in Philadelphia, chaplain to the Continental Congress, and later the first bishop of Pennsylvania and the first presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States:

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anglicans in canada In the late troubles, I firmly believe that you, like myself, took the part which conscience and judgment pointed out; and although we differed in sentiments, yet this did not in the least diminish my regard for you, nor the good opinion I had always of your temper, disposition, and religious principles. I ever shall esteem a man who acts from principle, and in the integrity of his heart, though his judgment of things may not exactly coincide with mine. In one point I am certain we agree, that is, in the desire of preserving our Church and promoting the interests of religion.5

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The BNA Episcopate Inglis remained in close touch with many of the royal officials who would be giving leadership in the loyal British colonies. Like them, he recognized that before the loyal provinces received thousands of refugees they would require new political, cultural, and religious institutions on a very large scale. In regard to religion, churches would have to be built, schools opened, structures of ecclesiastical supervision created, and financial arrangements developed. A strong, well-ordered Church of England, led by loyal clergy and schoolmasters, was needed to teach truth, to minister to the needs of the settlers, and to shape a peaceable, monarchical civil society. The single most vital thing, he supposed, was to appoint an Anglican bishop. If Britain failed again to support the Church of England in North America, it might lose still more colonies. After the loss of first American empire, as long as Tories ruled in London the surest way to move the Colonial Office to find money for a bishop was to hint that the colonists were turning disloyal. The French Revolution of 1789, which officials feared might infect Quebec, would produce the first bishop of Quebec in 1793. A rebellion in Upper Canada in 1837 would produce the first bishop of Toronto in 1839. Riots in 1849 protesting the Rebellion Losses Bill would produce the first bishop in Montreal in 1850. The first bishop of Nova Scotia, the very first overseas bishop of all, came as a response to the American Revolution. There had been no Anglican bishop in North America until that time. The bishop of London, by the authority of the Crown, had jurisdiction in the overseas colonies (or so it was usually believed; one bishop of London doubted it), and the bishop sometimes appointed colonial commissaries to exercise some of his authority. But without a bishop in North America there could be no real diocesan oversight and pastoral discipline—and no confirmations or ordinations. Many Anglicans in New York and New England, including Inglis, complained that an episcopal church without bishops was monstrous and absurd in principle, a violation of the Church’s constitution. The SPG and others pressed the British government to appoint American bishops, but political opposition from non-Anglicans proved decisive. Bishops had too often persecuted people for their beliefs. Indeed, suspicions of an Anglican “plot” to appoint

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questions about the church in society American bishops may have helped precipitate the Revolution.6 Before then, not only non-Anglicans but, truth be told, even most American Anglicans opposed bishops. American Anglicans quite liked the ethos of lay control and a measure of independence from the motherland.7 In 1783, while Inglis and some of his coreligionists were waiting in New York for the peace treaty to be signed, they wrote a rationale for appointing a colonial bishop. Their influential letter (Document 13) was addressed to Sir Guy Carleton, the former governor of Quebec who was now the British commander-in-chief at New York. Carleton in turn forwarded it to Lord North, the British prime minister, who gave it serious attention, perhaps excessively serious. The British government and its appointed officials in North America did not entirely understand that only a minority of loyalists was Anglican. Overestimating the strength of Tory Anglicanism, they were willing to favor the Church of England, not only in making political appointments and administrative decisions for Nova Scotia and Quebec but also in developing constitutional and financial structures for their churches. And so it was that just as the American states were committing themselves to separating church and state, the British government was doing its best to bind them together, an approach that in the end proved to be a failure. As the British government was reflecting on the question of a colonial episcopate in BNA, it received a request from Anglicans in the Protestant Episcopal Churches of some of the young American states to permit bishops to be consecrated for them. With the Revolution and the disestablishment of religion, the Episcopal Church could no longer be anything other than one denomination among others. Non-Episcopalians could no longer feel threatened by an Episcopal bishop. Indeed, the young United States government itself, and the governors of the four states most likely to be immediately affected, assured the British government that they were very content for some Protestant Episcopal bishops to be consecrated. And if bishops could be consecrated for the United States, nothing stood in the way of consecrating bishops for the loyal colonies of BNA. An order in council in 1786 instructed a high-level committee—the Privy Council Committee for Trade and Plantations—to make recommendations concerning a colonial episcopate, and after eight meetings over several months, and lobbying such as can hardly be imagined, the committee recommended Charles Inglis as the first bishop of Nova Scotia. Meanwhile, two bishops for the United States, after being formally presented by the American ambassador to Britain, were consecrated at Lambeth Palace in February 1787. Preparations were made for Inglis to follow. Ever since the days of King Henry VIII, an act of Parliament had defined the standard procedure for making an Anglican bishop. First the king or queen had to decide whom to appoint, and in this case the choice of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations was very acceptable. Then the king made the decision effective by royal letters patent, which were used for all important appoint-

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anglicans in canada ments and commissions (Document 14). (“Patent” means “open.” Unlike private letters, which were folded closed and then sealed on the flap, letters patent were left open with the Great Seal on the bottom, signifying a matter of public record.) The ruling king or queen also had to mandate the archbishop of the province to consecrate the new bishop. Now this time-honored machinery was put into motion for the first colonial Anglican bishop. Much of the phraseology in the royal letters patent appointing Inglis bishop, and mandating the archbishop of Canterbury to consecrate him, would recur in subsequent letters patent to colonial bishops. The exception was that after 1842 the Crown no longer conferred “all manner of jurisdiction, power and coercion ecclesiastical” on its colonial bishops. The change was the result of a legal challenge from Tasmania, in which the law officers of the Crown concurred. Inglis also received a second patent, dated August 13, 1787, extending his episcopal jurisdiction to a vast territory incorporating Quebec (including present-day Ontario), New Brunswick, and Newfoundland. The preamble stated that “it seems necessary to Us” that episcopal functions should be performed in those places, even though they were “not yet divided or formed into Dioceses or Bishops’ Sees.” Some history books assert that Bermuda was also part of Inglis’s jurisdiction, but it was not named in his letters patent. He was consecrated bishop on August 12, 1787. In retrospect, one can find much to criticize in the whole procedure. It had become an ingrained mentality that colonies should follow the pattern of the mother country, even though colonial conditions were wholly different socially, economically, politically, and religiously. The Nova Scotia episcopate was planned not by the Church of England but by lawyers and administrators of the Crown, and their job was not to adapt Anglicanism to a new situation but to make sure that existing laws were followed. How bishops were chosen, who empowered them, who authorized their consecration, what purposes they served, what they were allowed to do, where they got their money, with whom they could consult, and to whom they were accountable—all these things followed precedent and proved to be wholly inappropriate in the colonial situation. Every piece of it had to be changed over the next eighty years. In the meantime, much damage was done and much good was prevented from being achieved. Inglis never visited Newfoundland, but otherwise he bravely attempted to build the Church in this vast jurisdiction. In the summer of 1789 he set sail for Quebec and summoned the clergy of that province to meet with him. It was a classic episcopal visitation. The bishop interviewed the clergy; led them in worship; investigated the spiritual, pastoral, and administrative condition of their churches; and issued injunctions to correct defects and inconsistencies.8 Quebec was mercifully taken from his vast jurisdiction in 1793, when the Crown formed it into an Anglican diocese and appointed Jacob Mountain (1749–1825) as its first bishop.9

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questions about the church in society

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Anglican Privilege in Lower and Upper Canada Inglis and others hoped that the British government might finally establish the Church of England in Quebec and provide for it financially. The government moved a fair distance in that direction with the Constitutional Act (or Canada Act) of 1791. This act was intended to accommodate those thousands of Englishspeaking Protestants who were settling in the western part of Quebec and not at all pleased to find themselves a minority in a French-speaking, Roman Catholic colony. The Constitutional Act, therefore, divided Quebec into two provinces, one predominantly French-speaking and Roman Catholic, which it called Lower Canada (present-day Quebec) and the other predominantly Englishspeaking and Protestant, which it called Upper Canada (present-day Ontario). To each it gave its own colonial government. To the dismay of many loyalists supporting the English model of Anglicanism, the act did not formally establish the Church of England as the legislatures of the Maritime Provinces had done. In fact, it gave no special constitutional privileges to Anglicans. Perhaps authorities were worried that such favoritism might provoke the Roman Catholic majority in Lower Canada if not also the Protestant dissenters of Upper Canada. The major political privilege extended to Anglicans was that in 1794 the bishop of Quebec received special letters patent making him “Lord Bishop,” and he was then admitted to membership on the Executive Council, apparently by the authority of section 6 of the Constitutional Act. Although the act did not establish the Church of England, it lavished on it a hugely generous financial endowment.10 Land is the basis of wealth in an agricultural society, and the financial support given by the Constitutional Act to the Church of England in BNA was landed property—vast expanses of landed property. Setting aside land for the financial support of the Church and clergy in an English colony was not a new idea; it had been done in Virginia as early as 1618. The Act for Canada referred to three kinds of landed endowment. One was glebe—land assigned by the government for the use of a pastor.11 In BNA, the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the Roman Catholic Church had glebes. Sometimes the land was used for a parsonage; sometimes it was rented out to produce income that went to the pastor. Before the loyalist period, Anglican churches at Annapolis and Halifax had already received grants of glebe land. In 1785 the surveyor-general of Nova Scotia was beginning to set aside six hundred acres in each township for the use of the church and another four hundred acres for the use of the school, both of which, it was assumed, would be run by Anglicans. These surveys, however, were not completed, and in 1813 another one was undertaken on a less generous principle. In the old Province of Quebec before 1791, a few glebes for Anglican churches were also laid out, as at Kingston and Cornwall. In Upper Canada, a reported 22,345 acres were set apart as glebe for Anglican clergy between 1789 and 1833.12

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anglicans in canada Ownership of glebe lands was not conveyed to the churches. In Upper Canada, the government owned glebe lands, and the receiver general collected the rents on behalf of the Church. In Nova Scotia, glebe lands were sometimes conveyed to diocesan or civic officials as fiduciaries. Often the reservation of glebe land was recorded on land surveys, never conveyed, and then forgotten. The total annual value of all glebe land in Nova Scotia in 1832 was only £167. The second form of the Church’s landed ownership according to the Constitutional Act, and by far the largest, concerned “clergy reserves.” The Atlantic provinces had no similar provision. One-seventh of the value of all Crown land grants in Upper Canada, and one-seventh of all new land grants in Lower Canada, were to be appropriated to the “Support and Maintenance of a Protestant Clergy.” Thus the act directed the two colonial governments of Upper and Lower Canada to reserve public land for religious purposes, lease it out if possible, and use the rental income toward the stipends of the clergy. The quantity of surveyed clergy-reserve land in 1836 was declared to be about 2.2 million acres in Upper Canada and about 628,000 acres in Lower Canada. What the phrase Protestant Clergy meant for those who framed the Constitutional Act was much debated in pre-Confederation Canada, and historians continue to debate it. But Anglican leaders initially claimed the whole, and it was their church that received by far most of the benefit. Until 1827, clergy-reserve land could only be leased, and it had little value because most settlers qualified for free land. In Lower Canada, the average annual profit from all this land between 1791 and 1837 was estimated as £3.13 After 1827 quantities of it could be sold, but only the interest on the capital went to the Church. Distinctions between glebe lands and clergy-reserve lands are sometimes difficult to define, because new glebes were sometimes taken from the clergy reserves and both kinds of landed endowment were sometimes administered together. The third kind of landed endowment, provided in section 38 of the Constitutional Act, was parish rectories, which could be erected by colonial governors. Creating a rectory gave parish churches a legal corporate identity so they could own property. The first request under this section of the act came from Christ Church, Montreal, in 1792. Bishop Mountain experienced profound frustrations trying to wring a response from successive governors of Lower Canada. For one thing, the lawyers wanted ample time to reflect largely on the appropriate policies and procedures for creating a rectory, resulting in what Mountain called “that sort of procrastination which is generally complained of, when business passes through the hands of the Gentlemen of the Law.”14 Moreover, governors always had more pressing matters to attend to. Perhaps most important, they feared giving affront to the Roman Catholic majority, especially during the touchy years of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. As a result, Christ Church, Montreal, had to wait twenty-six years for the province to produce letters patent creating its parish and rectory. Letters followed creating eleven parishes in Lower Canada.

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In Upper Canada, the provision for rectories proved even more controversial. None was created until 1836, when Sir John Colborne, the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, on the eve of being recalled to England, executed forty-four patents creating rectories and granting them endowments of land. Colborne’s act raised a storm of controversy, not least because he took about three-quarters of the rectory lands out of clergy reserves in which other denominations were claiming a share. “In the opinion of many persons,” the governor-general, Lord Durham, recorded in his great Report of 1839, “this was the chief predisposing cause” of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837.15 Legal wrangling in the courts about the rectory grants persisted for two decades. Although in practice what the Constitutional Act gave the Church of England in Canada was, like the glebe of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, almost entirely worthless wasteland, in principle it was an immensely generous endowment. Some day it might even have some value. But for many Anglican loyalists the act failed to go far enough. The popular impression of early colonial anglophone BNA is often one of Anglican bishops and higher clergy in comfortable symbiosis with governors, executive councilors, financiers, and captains of industry, themselves often Anglicans. That impression, however, is misleading. Anglican Church leaders were perpetually frustrated because in almost every particular they thoroughly depended on politicians and members of the social elite, for whom church affairs were usually a low priority. In the most important and most populous province, Quebec, matters were further complicated by the political relationships between francophone Roman Catholics and anglophone Protestants. The “symbiosis” was in actuality a subordination of church business to government politics, which very frequently exasperated Anglican leaders.

John Strachan The most energetic defender of the financial privileges of the Church of England in Canada, and the most outspoken champion of a full Church establishment, was John Strachan (1778–1867), who served Upper Canada as a priest for more than sixty years, twenty-seven of them (1839–67) as bishop of Toronto.16 Strachan was born a Scot, the son of the overseer of a quarry. Although his family was not of a social class that usually sent its children for a classical education, young Strachan worked hard, and his family made sacrifices. He earned his M.A. from King’s College, Aberdeen. He found a position as a schoolmaster, for he was a gifted teacher, and took some courses in divinity at St. Andrew’s University. In 1799 an opportunity came to him to teach in Upper Canada, and he accepted. For three years he taught a dozen boys and a girl in Kingston, in the employ, ironically, of Richard Cartwright, the critic of establishment. Then Strachan felt moved to be ordained to parish ministry. Cartwright and the Anglican minister in Kingston, John Stuart, arranged for him to be nominated

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anglicans in canada to the Anglican parish in Cornwall, U.C. After being ordained by Bishop Mountain in Quebec, he moved to Cornwall, built a church, and opened a school where he taught many who would become prominent leaders of the province. Strachan also wrote books whenever he could. He married Ann Wood, a wealthy widow aged only twenty-two. In 1812 he was nominated to the parish in York (later Toronto) and went reluctantly; he would have preferred Kingston. A year later Americans invaded York, and Strachan’s principled, firm, and often courageous leadership during those difficult days became a local legend. Increasingly, Strachan was a person of importance in Upper Canada. With his British university education, his friendships with the elite of society, his years of preparing their children for responsible positions, his ministry in the parish church in the capital of the province, his facility with writing, his charm, his pertinacity, his political skill, and the reputation for patriotism he had earned during the War of 1812, he was able to advance himself and the Anglican cause he loved. He also enjoyed a handsome income, a magnificent house, and the indulgence of expensive tastes. He was made a member of the Executive Council (much like a cabinet) in 1817, a member of the Legislative Council in 1820, chair of the corporation that oversaw all the clergy-reserve land of Upper Canada in 1819, and president of the Board for the General Superintendence of Education for Upper Canada in 1823. In 1825 the colonial secretary in Britain, Lord Bathurst, advised him that he would be the first archdeacon of York. It looked as if the Church of England, through Strachan, had secured control of the political, educational, economic, and social life of Upper Canada. The only problem was that a growing number of politicians and journalists were criticizing the system of Anglican privilege. It fell to Strachan to remind Anglicans why they deserved so much public funding, favor, and power. The occasion that presented itself was a memorial service for his late bishop, Jacob Mountain, at the church in York on July 3, 1825. Strachan was to preach the sermon. Of his thousands of letters, treatises, sermons, charges, speeches, and other writings, none proved more influential, albeit in ways entirely counter to his intentions, than this sermon. William Westfall of York University calls it “one of the most important documents in the religious and cultural history of early nineteenth-century Canada.”17 The sermon, like other formal sermons of the day, is very long; excerpts are published as Document 15. Strachan’s rationale for establishment in 1825, compared with the usual rationale of the 1790s, dwelt rather little on the advantages of providing a frontier society with churches and Christian ministers. The fact was that some other denominations were making better provision for churches and Christian ministers by the 1820s than the establishment was, and they were doing so without assistance from the state. Moreover, the unfairness of privileging one group of Christians, which rankled more people in the 1820s than in the 1790s, had to be addressed. Strachan therefore stressed the point that the Church of England was more deserving of public support than the religious competition because

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:46.

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questions about the church in society of its sounder theology, more excellent liturgy, greater social utility, more dependable loyalty, more defensible approach to mission and ministry, and, perhaps above all, greater concern for education. (The very influential Archdeacon Paley in England had justified Church establishment largely on the grounds of its educational contributions to society.) Although it has been suggested that Strachan’s target audience was the Anglican community, perhaps especially the Anglican officialdom that might advance his ambitions to be bishop, the dissenters of Upper Canada presently heard about the sermon, too. The sermon is often seen as the beginning of the decline of Anglican privilege and influence in Ontario. It aroused a twenty-three-year-old Methodist circuit rider, Egerton Ryerson (1803–82), to take on the “Family Compact” of Upper Canada in a spirited and able reply. With that, Ryerson was immediately recognized as a reforming leader of importance. He would later become principal of Victoria College, and he was the chief architect of the system of public education in Ontario, which in turn became a model for other Canadian jurisdictions. Ryerson’s recollection of how Strachan’s sermon catapulted him into public life, excerpted from his Story of My Life, is given in Document 16.

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John Inglis The second bishop of Nova Scotia, John Inglis (1777–1850), son of the first bishop, was almost exactly Strachan’s contemporary, and his views were closely parallel as well. Born in a troubled New York City during the Revolutionary War, Inglis was ordained by his father in Nova Scotia and served as his trusted assistant and adviser. Like Strachan, he lived the life of a wealthy aristocrat; he was called the “most polished gentleman of his time,” next to King George IV.18 He was an uncompromising establishmentarian to the core who did his best to maintain the financial, legal, and social privileges of the Anglican Church and disdained all forms of ecumenical cooperation. Like Strachan, John Inglis represented the Church in a way precisely calculated to antagonize a religiously diverse colonial society moving toward self-government.

The Erosion of Anglican Special Status Several influences worked together to erode the officially favored position of the Church of England in BNA. First, politically savvy and very capable dissenters (non-Anglican Protestants) were rising to leadership in most colonial assemblies. The assemblies were representative bodies, unlike the executive and legislative councils that were appointed by the Crown and usually solidly Anglican. By the late 1820s, assemblies were hammering away at Anglican privilege. The temperature was highest in Upper Canada, partly because of Archdeacon Strachan’s aggressions on behalf of the Church of England. Lieutenant-Gover-

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anglicans in canada nor Sir John Colborne wrote to the bishop of Quebec in 1829 that Strachan’s political scheming “injures to a very great degree the interests of the Episcopal Church, and I am afraid, of religion, also.”19 Soon after his sermon on Mountain, the assembly of Upper Canada engaged Strachan head-on. He had composed an inaccurate “ecclesiastical chart” and sent it to the Colonial Office, purporting to show that the clergy of the Church of England, compared to their rivals, were very numerous and very well educated. Six thousand persons petitioned the assembly in protest. A select committee investigated, and its devastating report of 1828 was much noted in the popular press. Drafted by Marshall Bidwell (1799–1872), the member for Lennox and Addington, the report contrasted the extreme favor the Anglican Church had enjoyed with the unimpressive following it had mustered. “The tendency of the population is not towards that church,” the report inferred. In fact, it concluded, “There is in the minds of the people generally a strong and settled aversion to any thing like an established Church.”20 A few years later, Bidwell was forced into exile by the lieutenant governor. A second circumstance eroding Anglican establishment in BNA was that in 1828 England itself began repealing laws that imposed disabilities on Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters. This changing sentiment in England, along with republican movements in Europe and Jacksonian democracy in the United States, all of which were intent on transferring power from old elites to the wider public, supported reform in Canada. Third, changes in British economic theory were beginning to undermine the colonial system by the 1820s, and once the mother country ceased protecting colonies, it would, presumably, cease protecting colonial Anglican churches. Previously, colonialism had been justified by the economic theory of mercantilism, which taught that colonies helped the mother country control trade, restrict competition, and accumulate wealth. Now, free-market economic theory taught that the colonial system added unnecessarily to the expenses of the mother country and deterred it from seeking cheaper sources of supply and developing new markets. In 1825 an author in the Edinburgh Review, one of the most influential periodicals among British intellectuals, observed, “We defy any one to point out a single benefit, of any sort whatever, derived by us from the possession of Canada, and our other colonies in North America.”21 The date that best represents the triumph of economic liberalism is 1846, when Britain repealed the Corn Laws and thus eliminated preferential treatment for Canadian cereal crops. Fourth, the impracticalities of the Church establishment discontented many Anglican leaders. They were forever dealing with English bishops and English colonial secretaries and English mission societies and provincial governors and provincial legislatures, a time-consuming, wearisome, and highly politicized process. They quickly learned that policies changed when English bishops or prime ministers or colonial secretaries or mission secretaries or governors or legislatures changed. Without the permission of others Canadian Anglican lead-

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:46.

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questions about the church in society ers could not create dioceses or parishes, appoint rectors, make liturgical changes, organize funding, or adapt systems of Church government to new social contexts. Jacob Mountain felt powerless to so much as circulate a form of prayer to his churches without the governor’s permission.22 There was perpetual confusion about the extent to which various English laws and customs applied in the Colonies. In short, economic and political dependence, legal uncertainties, and a colonial mentality kept BNA Anglicans in tutelage. Ironically, non-Anglican denominations enjoyed far greater freedom and ability to plan for the future, organize property and budgets, make institutional decisions, and respond to needs for ministry than the favored Church of England. Fifth, immigration from the United States, particularly of clergy such as those sponsored by the New England Company, helped cultivate disestablishmentarian views.23

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The Tractarian Critique of Establishment The nail in the coffin of Church establishment was a new school of Anglican thought that burst forth in 1833. The theological approach was variously called the Oxford movement because it gathered its first strength in Oxford University, tractarianism because for the first few years it published programmatic tracts, and anglo-catholicism because it sought to recall the Church of England to a purer catholic tradition. It crystalized when Oxford dons protested a decision by the British government to reduce the thirty-two bishoprics in Ireland to ten for financial reasons. Should the interests of a divine institution (the dons complained) thus be sacrificed to the short-term temporal concerns of the king and Parliament? Was the Church of Jesus Christ nothing more than a department of government? Later, a young tractarian named George Selwyn (1809–78), when made bishop of New Zealand in 1841, was appalled to discover that the letters patent appointing him bishop (like those that had appointed Charles Inglis bishop) gave him the power to ordain. The king of England might be a very great prince, but he was not Jesus Christ, and he was not the Holy Spirit, and he was not even the successor of the Apostles. So how could he presume to bestow the power to ordain? Tractarianism thus represented a fresh appreciation of the divine authority of the Church and a desire to free it from its captivity to the state. Tractarian views had an early impact on Anglican thinking in Canada, primarily through the appointment of tractarian bishops. Long before tractarian bishops were acceptable in England, they were being sent to the Colonies. English bishops were named by prime ministers sensitive to public opinion, but many overseas bishops began to be chosen by a group called the Colonial Bishoprics Council, founded in 1841 as an offshoot of the SPG and controlled by high-church and tractarian Anglicans. Its first bishop was Selwyn for New Zealand, and soon thereafter it erected the dioceses of Fredericton (1845) and Montreal (1850) in BNA.

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anglicans in canada Like Selwyn, colonial tractarian bishops disdained the loyalist establishmentarianism of old-style, high-church bishops such as Charles Inglis, Jacob Mountain, and John Strachan. Edward Feild (1801–76), appointed second bishop of Newfoundland in 1844, was an early example of tractarian sensibility. Arriving at St. John’s for the first time, he was more surprised than pleased to be greeted by an official delegation led by the son and the private secretary of the governor while the Royal Newfoundland Companies and officers on the wharf presented arms and a private carriage waited onshore to whisk him off to a reception at Government House. He wrote, “I should have preferred a procession with litanies and holy services attended by priests and choristers leading me to church. . . . To me, personally, the whole proceedings were as distasteful as they were unsought for and unexpected.”24 Feild’s two contrasting images, state Church and praying Church, perfectly illustrate the difference between loyalist high-church Anglican and tractarian. John Medley (1804–92), appointed first bishop of Fredericton in 1845, had published criticisms of the Church’s establishment as early as 1834. He clearly stated his opposition to it in his first charge (or formal episcopal address) to his clergy in 1847 and returned to it on many occasions thereafter. Speaking of the Church as “established,” he said, had “conferred upon it very little advantage” but had “exposed it to no small share of envy and obloquy.”25 Hearing that a parish in his diocese had received a government grant to build churches, George Hills (1816–95), a tractarian appointed first bishop of British Columbia in 1859, politely but firmly asked it to decline (Document 17).

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Landmarks of the Decline of Anglican Special Status Some landmarks of the decline of Anglican establishment and privilege can be summarized. —During the early 1830s, the various provinces of BNA amended discriminatory marriage legislation, dating from the previous century, in order to make it possible or easier for non-Anglican clergy to perform marriages. —Provincial executive and legislative councils no longer made a place for Anglican bishops after 1837 (Lower Canada), 1841 (Upper Canada), 1851 (Nova Scotia), and 1856 (New Brunswick). —Policies and sometimes statutes that had favored the appointment of Anglicans as schoolmasters in Upper Canada and the Atlantic provinces were superseded, in most cases in the 1830s.26 —The Church of England was legally disestablished in Nova Scotia in 1851, New Brunswick in 1854, and Prince Edward Island in 1879. —The authority to appoint the ministers of parish churches was withdrawn from the governors of Canada in 1852 and from the governor of New Brunswick in 1869.

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:51:46.

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questions about the church in society —Governments ceased subsidizing Anglican university education. An annual grant from the British government to King’s College, Windsor, was withdrawn by the British government in 1834, and an annual grant from the Province of Nova Scotia was withdrawn in 1851. King’s College, Toronto, was secularized and renamed the University of Toronto in 1849. McGill University lost its Anglican connection in statutes passed in 1854. King’s College, Fredericton, was secularized and renamed the University of New Brunswick in 1859. —The glebe land of Prince Edward Island was secularized by the Act of 1835, although the implementation of the act was delayed for several years while the bishop of Nova Scotia tried to have it overturned. The Province of Nova Scotia decided in 1839 to secularize the land set aside for Anglican schools but not the clergy glebe. In 1854 the legislature of Canada, after years of controversy and agitation, secularized clergy reserves, although it protected the life interest of those clergy who were already receiving income from it by paying a commutation, which for the Church of England totaled £245,614. In the preamble to the act, a significant phrase stood out: “Whereas it is desirable to remove all semblance of connection between Church and State.”

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Official Privilege Advocates of special status for Anglicans claimed that privilege helped the Church recruit good clergy, minister to a widely distributed population, build churches, and run schools. Anglican critics answered that some other denominations succeeded in these areas—and without government assistance—by relying on the voluntary support of committed members. Not only was Anglican privilege unnecessary, they argued, but it was also positively damaging because it left Canadian Anglicans without a sense of responsibility to the Church. Advocates for the American model of Anglican identity were gathering strength. They saw religion as a matter for individual interest and decision and for voluntary associations of like-minded persons. Advocates of the English model rejoined that society had a very great interest indeed in ensuring that people acted with personal integrity, consideration of others, moral principle, concern for truth, and loyalty to rightful authority. These were the qualities the Church was positioned to inculcate. In other words, they favored public support of religion for many of the reasons that most today favor public support of education. Bishop Jacob Mountain reacted incredulously when the gentlemen of the SPG expected the Anglicans of Quebec to pay their minister’s salary. Mountain knew that most Anglicans in Quebec, because they took little interest in the Christian faith, would refuse to pay, but what good would it do to dismiss their minister? “I trust they [the SPG] will rather reflect,” wrote Moun-

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anglicans in canada tain, “that the less sincerely desirous people are of the benefits of religious instruction, the more they stand in need of them.”27 At the heart of the English model of Anglican identity was the conviction that the Church of England was for everyone, religious and unreligious alike— if anything, rather more for the unreligious. That was a large part of what it meant to be a missionary Church, and that was a large part of what it meant to give Christian leadership in society. A strategic problem with the English model was that the Church, in seeking to make a difference to society, required the assistance of the powerful and therefore linked itself with the upper echelons of the social hierarchy and the status quo. Therefore, it lost credibility among those whom the status quo served poorly. As a sociologist with historical interests wrote of the Anglican Church before Confederation, “To some extent the identification of the Church with social privilege was a consequence of its failure to capture the support of the backwoods farming population; to some extent, on the other hand it was responsible for such a failure.”28 Ironically, the elitist tendencies of Anglicanism were reinforced by the Church’s disendowment and loss of social status, which left it economically dependent on well-heeled, well-networked parishioners. The Anglican Church of Canada today still has no reputation for populism.

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The Church’s Role in Society, 1860–1960 By the 1860s, the Church’s largest endowments were confiscated, many of its institutions had been secularized, and most of its special statutes were rescinded. For the most part and in most places, the Anglican Church had become one mainline denomination among other mainline denominations. But being a mainline denomination was itself no small thing, because in the Dominion of Canada all mainline denominations continued to enjoy public respect, informal influence, government support, and social prominence until the 1960s. Canada saw itself as a Christian nation, and churches were therefore essential to its sense of national identity and purpose. Moreover, until the 1940s churches delivered the bulk of the country’s social services and public welfare. They administered hospitals and home nursing programs; housing for the elderly or the poor or orphans or other groups; schools (and sometimes, as in Quebec and Newfoundland, whole school systems); and services to immigrant populations and the needy. Clergy visited public schools periodically to give religious instructions, and teachers opened school each morning with prayer. Churches ran Indian schools under government contract (chapter 1). In many communities clergy sometimes acted as notaries, judges, and civic officials, as they still do in some Newfoundland outports. Social service figured high on the agenda of Anglican dioceses, parishes, religious orders, foundations, and commissions from the 1890s to the 1950s.

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questions about the church in society Society treated the clergy of all mainline denominations specially. Railways gave them discounts on fares (bishops received free passes). When the federal government began levying a tax on personal income in 1917, it privileged clergy with special deductions, which they still receive. Local governments exempted churches from property taxes. Coffee shops gave free meals to clergy, and other businesses regularly gave ministers special consideration. Provincial governments gave educational grants for the training of clergy. Monday-morning newspapers reported the sermons of key preachers and gave vigorous coverage to church news. In the Hollywood films that entertained Canadians, clergy were usually portrayed as at least people of integrity, even sometimes as role models, by actors such as Bing Crosby and Edmund O’Brien and Spencer Tracy. Although formally the Anglican Church enjoyed no greater social position than any other denomination, informally it continued to enjoy certain privileges. Robert Machray (1831–1904), the first Anglican primate of Canada, chaired the Protestant section of the Manitoba Board of Education as long as it existed and served as chancellor of the University of Manitoba for more than a quarter of a century. Derwyn Owen, the primate during World War II, was a dignitary of national prominence, like William Temple, his contemporary archbishop of Canterbury, and radio networks broadcast his addresses across the country. Anglican clergy were often favored with invitations to pray over sittings of the legislature, bless buildings and ships, decorate state and civic occasions, and officiate at special community or military services of worship, as indeed they still sometimes are. It was often Anglican clergy who were chosen to bring a moral tone and authority to municipal boards, film censorship committees, and public meetings. The Church of England in Canada was interwoven into the social fabric, more so than any other denomination other than the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec, even though only in British Columbia was it ever the most populous religious group. This informal status was in part a holdover from earlier days. It also no doubt reflected that the Church of England was still, after all, the established Church of the mother country, and Canada continued to think of England as the mother country well into the 1940s. The sovereign of Canada was the supreme governor of the Mother Church (although no longer of the Church in Canada). Anglicans prayed for the royal family twice a day on weekdays, more often on Sundays, by the instructions of the Book of Common Prayer, and they sang “God Save the Queen” during worship. Their churches were customarily ornamented with the Union Jack, regimental colors, and other symbols of state. Bishops had a certain mystique, too, as well as a quotability in the press, that Methodist superintendents and Presbyterian presbyters and Baptist pastors lacked. It helped that bishops were regularly addressed as “my lord” and archbishops as “your grace,” a practice that has even yet not entirely disappeared. Derwyn Owen knew his importance. One of his priests once invited him to play a round of golf. He accepted, “but,” as the priest recalled, “in the locker room remarked, ‘No

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anglicans in canada doubt you feel very important, playing with the Primate of All Canada.’ It was a stinging rebuff which put the recipient off his game.”29 Because Anglican clergy were inclined to think of themselves as a cut above other clergy, they needed to conform to the most socially respectable standards. Riding on horseback to Hope, British Columbia, in 1860, Bishop George Hills was shocked to hear his young chaplain whistling. “It is so undignified. I might say so unclerical,” he admonished.30 A whistling Methodist parson might not have raised eyebrows. Until the 1960s Anglican theological students in their refectories were served by maids and trained in table etiquette.

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Social Christianity Part of the social role of the Anglican Church was always to guard and improve the moral character of society, even if Anglicans disagreed what moral character was and how it could best be achieved. In loyalist and early Victorian days, Anglican leaders had generally concentrated on the earnest teaching of social duty according to Tory and elitist principles, a perspective that was never entirely lost. A nineteenth-century bishop of Nova Scotia defended pew rentals because, he said, it was most unseemly to seat people of no standing beside respectable citizens.31 By the 1890s the Church’s concern for the moral character of society came to be more frequently expressed in campaigns for social improvement through programmatic interventions. The new “social Christianity” meant identifying the social and economic evils of the day and commending to the public, to governments, and to private enterprise the secular solutions that seemed most consistent with Christian teaching. Social Christianity was thus based on the “modern” theory that the ills of society could be ameliorated through planned strategic changes in political, social, and economic structures and policies (chapter 5). The beginnings of social Christianity in Canada are often seen in the temperance movement. In the 1820s, temperance workers had been content to treat alcoholism as an individual problem to be tackled on an individual level. They exhorted the faithful to honor high moral standards, and they ministered to the fallen. By mid-century, temperance workers were seeing alcohol as a social problem with social causes requiring social solutions. Temperance advocates argued that alcohol was linked, as both cause and effect, with urban poverty, substandard living conditions, unemployment, crime, domestic abuse, and slums. The duty of the Church in response to alcoholism was not simply to minister to the victims of alcohol but to eliminate alcohol and improve social conditions. Anglicans debated these premises energetically. The Church of England Temperance Society was “reconstructed” as an effective organization in 1873. Its presidents were the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and its patron was Her Majesty the Queen. Parish branches appeared across Canada. Interdenominational and nondenominational temperance

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questions about the church in society lodges and societies were formed, often spearheaded by Methodists but always with a range of Anglican support. Numerous Anglican bishops, clergy, and laypeople took “the pledge.” In 1878 the Canada Temperance Act gave local governments the option to prohibit the retail sale of alcoholic beverages; the local option was widely used. A royal commission of 1893 asked clergy of various denominations whether they considered “the use of intoxicating liquors as morally and socially hurtful”; among Anglican clergy, 224 replied yes, 172 no. In 1896 General Synod set up a standing Committee on Temperance. During World War I, Canadians widely followed the example of the king, who teetotaled in order to help the war effort. By 1919 all the provincial governments had enacted prohibition legislation of some kind—there were many different meanings of the words temperance and prohibition. The results of this first widespread, legislatively ordained social interventionism were inconclusive. On the one hand, it was hard to prove that it actually ameliorated social evils. On the other hand, if it was not so successful as its proponents had hoped, perhaps what was required was stronger law and more systematic enforcement. A similar argument recurred whenever, or almost whenever, social reform legislation was suggested. Likewise, critics complained that the prohibition of alcohol would infringe on individual liberty. In fact, whenever a social reform of any kind was proposed, critics complained that it infringed on individual liberty. In the end, the opponents of social interventionism won the temperance battle. Most provinces repealed prohibition in the 1920s, just in time for some enterprising Canadian souls to make a fortune selling liquor to the Americans. The critics might have won a battle, but the war continued to be waged. Prohibition was defeated, but there remained the conviction, with an excellent Augustinian theological pedigree, that because moral decision making could not be expected from weak individuals, subject as they were to powerful social forces, an important part of the Christian task was to remove temptation and strengthen the standards and enforcement of Christian morality. After temperance, Anglican leaders and synods turned their attention to Lord’s Day observance. Social and economic pressures would always seduce people into breaking the Sabbath, and so the Church should support laws that forced businesses and public services to shut down on Sunday. General Synod created a committee in 1902 to keep Sunday observance on the public agenda. Another matter for concern was prostitution. The first report of a Committee of General Synod on Moral and Social Reform in 1911 reaffirmed that prostitution was a bad thing, but in the spirit of compassion and social engineering it went on to say that a prostitute was more victim than perpetrator. The committee recommended “so altering economic conditions that girls shall no longer be tempted by the pressure of poverty to lead an immoral life.”32 The experience of World War I reinforced social Christianity among both Protestants and Roman Catholics. Some of its most powerful advocates were

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anglicans in canada clergy who had served in the chaplaincy service and had seen the horrors of a war born of secular interests: “No war had been so clearly caused by the greed of one or two corrupt and aging political systems.”33 Many padres, Anglican and otherwise, returned from the war urging the churches to take arms against social and industrial problems. The scope of social interventionism expanded. In 1915 the Committee on Moral and Social Reform gave way to the Council for Social Service (CSS), which continued in existence until 1967. Its principal duty, according to its canon, was “to study social problems with a view to the solution of them in harmony with the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ; . . . and generally to promote the formation of a Christian public opinion upon social problems.” Its diverse interests in the 1910s included the promotion of “supervised public playgrounds,” “improving the social conditions of rural life,” and making “lewd cohabitation” a criminal offence.34 It produced more than 150 reports in its fifty years of existence. Anglicans joined with other churches and social welfare organizations in the Social Service Council of Canada, the nation’s earliest officially sponsored interdenominational group, which took pride in its clout with the government. It credited itself with helping to move the country toward several successful social interventions before 1920: setting up provincial film censorship boards, suppressing indecent literature, outlawing child labor, providing workers’ compensation, enacting prohibition, restricting the immigration of the “feebleminded,” and establishing voting rights for women. Posterity today applauds about half these achievements. What posterity will applaud tomorrow is not easily predicted. Over the next several decades the CSS looked with a kindly eye on some proposals that have stood the test of time, such as health insurance, social insurance and welfare mechanisms, and nuclear test-ban treaties.35 But some of its other attempts to bring the kingdom of God to earth now seem embarrassing. During the 1920s and 1930s, the single greatest concern of Anglican social service leaders was to limit the immigration of non-Anglo-Saxons, which, they believed, could only lead to the weakening of the British spirit, the growth of Bolshevist agitation, and multiculturalism. This concern they shared with Baptists, Methodists, and others.36 General Synod passed a resolution in 1927 criticizing the landing (immigration) of Central Europeans, and it mandated the primate and a few others to deliver the resolution to government leaders personally. During World War II, Anglican leaders declined to demand justice for Japanese Canadians who were being shipped to relocation camps, and in 1938, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the CSS diffidently requested the government to “continue to explore the possibilities for the immigration of selected groups of Jewish and non-Aryan Christians.”37 Nevertheless, in all of these areas it is important to recognize that Anglicans, whatever official reports might imply, were on different sides of the same issues. Some Anglicans, for example, preeminently missionaries for the Women’s Aux-

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iliary, ministered to Japanese Canadians in relocation camps. Many Anglicans advocated receiving Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Others formed progressive associations, such as the Anglican Fellowship for Social Action (chapter 4). What characterized Anglicanism was not a set of positions on the issues of the day, changing from time to time, but ongoing debates about how the Gospel should be applied to the life of the world. Through most of its history the chief theoretician of the CSS, although not its administrator, was Samuel Henry Prince (1886–1960), a liberal evangelical graduate of Wycliffe College in Toronto. After a long curacy at St. Paul’s, Halifax, from 1910 to 1919, he went to Columbia University in New York, where he earned a Ph.D. in the new discipline of sociology. His thesis, published as Catastrophe and Social Change, was a pioneering study based in part on his ministry during the Titanic disaster of 1912 and the apocalyptic Halifax explosion of 1917. Prince taught briefly at Columbia, then at King’s College, Halifax, from 1924 to 1951. He was a founder of the Maritime School of Social Work in 1941. In a retrospective address late in life, he identified four phases in twentieth-century Christian social service in Nova Scotia, a summary that would apply equally well to Canada as a whole: Its first concern had been in arousing people towards a greater realization of the grave need for moral and social reform. It had then experienced an institutional phase when the erection of institutions for custodial care was uppermost in emphasis. The third step had been to pioneer social legislation directed towards the needs of the ill, old, infirm, the feeble-minded, and the unemployed. But therapeutics is not enough; there must be prophylaxis. To cure and care for is the voice of the past, to prevent is the divine whisper of today. The task is to prevent the occurrence and recurrence of social ills. And so with the 1940s came a clearer understanding of the fact that while agitation and legislation are all important, the supreme emphasis must be put upon education.38

Several dioceses also had their own councils of social service that operated much like the CSS of General Synod. Often in collaboration with similar councils in other denominations and with government officials, the councils studied social problems, evaluated options, undertook planning, and made recommendations for changes in government policy.

The Decline of Anglican Social Prominence During the 1940s, governments began to accept the burden of public welfare, and churches were no longer expected to bear the principal responsibility for social services. Anglicans continued to administer or fund a variety of educational, medical, and social services. Women’s shelters and inner-city centers continued and even flourished in places, but these were increasingly specialized

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anglicans in canada ministries, independent of parish or diocesan oversight and not part of a comprehensive, Churchwide program of social amelioration and reform of which ordinary Anglicans were generally aware. With an increase in non-Christian immigration to Canada and a secularization of the Canadian ethos, fewer Anglicans could conceive of their Church entirely according to the English model of Anglicanism as the spiritual bulwark of civil society, even if Canadian Anglican identity continues to incorporate the English model in many respects. More Anglicans were questioning whether some of the traditional welfare and educational activities of the Church violated the proper separation of church and state. Religious instruction and prayers in the schools, for instance, although still seen by many Anglicans as an entirely proper way to strengthen the spiritual and moral fiber of young people, were seen by other Anglicans, and in increasing numbers, as a form of proselytizing a captive audience. In a post-Christian Canada, fewer saw the Church as the bulwark of society; more saw it as one special interest group among others. Politicians no longer identified themselves as Church members or the friends of Church interests. Bishops could no longer count on an audience with their provincial premier. Synods, when they gathered every year or two, might still vote impassioned resolutions on the issues of the day, but government ministers had ceased to tremble at their word. In 1975 Marc Lalonde, a member of the Trudeau cabinet, remarked that when he received a resolution from a church synod or conference on a social issue, he knew that it represented only the particular interest group that had maneuvered it onto the agenda of a business meeting, and he paid little attention.39 For their part, many churchgoers thought of the Church as a resource for personal piety and told their spiritual leaders to stay out of politics—a view that would have thoroughly puzzled John Strachan. Clergy lost their perquisites at railway wickets and in coffee shops. In popular entertainment, when they were portrayed at all in Hollywood films, perhaps in a wedding scene in a movie, they appeared as colorless figures at best and often as droll or ridiculous.

The Social Role of a Socially Marginalized Church Where churches have been socially powerful they have tended to wield social influence; where they have been without power they have tended to embrace other-worldliness, or, occasionally, to foment revolution. But the Anglican Church was not entirely ready to abdicate its role in society simply because it no longer walked in the corridors of power. It still had a vision for God’s justice, it still had compassion for the poor and the victimized, and it still worshipped a God who put down the mighty from their seats and exalted the humble and meek. Anglican conversations about the role of the Church in society continued as before but in a changed social context.

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questions about the church in society One way of being a Church without influence or worldly self-interest but passionately committed to the social good was modeled by Edward W. Scott (b. 1919), primate of the Anglican Church of Canada from 1971 to 1986.40 The son of an Anglican priest and raised in what he would recall as “almost poverty,” Scott attended the University of British Columbia and the Anglican Theological College, Vancouver. He took summer ministries among the native people of the province and was ordained on graduation. He was soon appointed general secretary of the Student Christian Movement chapter at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and served a parish in the diocese. Some who knew him well said that, at heart, he remained an SCM secretary all his life, happiest in dialog and teaching and always ready to question received orthodoxies, plot social action, or catch a vision for creative ministry. His understanding of the role of the Church in society can be illustrated with a story. Talking with groups of students on occasions throughout his life, he often asked them if they could recite John 3:16. Invariably, they could, for this was probably the best-known verse of the New Testament. Then he asked them if they could remember John 3:17. Silence often followed until he quoted, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” A picture of a generous-hearted, non-condemning God intent on working in society to bring healing, wholeness, and the fullness of life through Christ was central to Scott’s theology and ministry. Scott became director of social services for the diocese of Rupert’s Land and priest-in-charge of Indian work; then, in 1964 he took a staff position in the Council of Social Service in Toronto. In 1965 he was elected bishop of Kootenay in the interior of British Columbia, where he helped build up the diocesan lay training center at Sorrento, which continues to have national significance. He was elected primate in 1971. As a bishop, Scott seemed to care nothing for the trappings or claims of ecclesiastical office, and he acted quite as if church hierarchies had no existence. His signature self-introduction, “call me Ted,” no doubt authentic, was much caricatured. In his combination of personal unpretentiousness and a passionate faithfulness to a just and compassionate God, he modeled what he understood the Anglican Church was called to be. The Church was there to have a dialog with the world and turn it toward justice. The problem was that government and business no longer needed to pay attention to what churches were trying to say to them. Publicity and confrontation would therefore often be necessary. However compelling, Scott’s view was, certainly among Canadian Anglicans, a minority one. Many had rather liked the old-style Anglican alliance with social and economic structures; others claimed to prefer no politics at all. It was far easier to find twenty Anglicans to go to a liturgy, a parish dinner, or a forum on a church controversy than to join a demonstration against the poisoning of Nishga’a fishing waters by the chemical wastes of the Amax Corporation. By 1980

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anglicans in canada the social activism of the Anglican Church had become sharply divisive, even in General Synod let alone among ordinary people in the pews. The debate about the proper social role of the Anglican Church was probably never more animated than it was during Scott’s primacy. Business executives at wealthy St. Clement’s, Toronto, organized resistance to Scott and gave media interviews denouncing his left-wing politics. Columnists in the secular press and letter-writers to church newspapers told Scott that South African blacks actually quite liked apartheid, and that even if they did not it was good for them, and that even if it were not, the Canadian economy depended on the freedom of banks to make secret loans wherever they wanted. Members of Anglican churches defected or cancelled pledges. In October 1978 the Canadian public affairs television program W-5 invited the primate to an interview so that it could accuse him of supporting African murderers. Most Anglicans respected Scott as a person of Christian conscience, and those who knew him liked him, but fewer agreed with his vision for the Church in society. Next to Scott himself, the most important instrument of Anglican social leadership during his primacy was the Public Social Responsibility Unit, which held its first meeting in 1974. It began by identifying a huge agenda: native people, environment, racism, colonialism, human rights, immigration policies and refugees, trade policies, inflation, income distribution, energy and natural resources, advertising and consumer protection, international development, urbanization, housing, armaments, and extravagant life-style. It decided to concentrate most of its attention on northern development and South Africa but found time to challenge Nestlé for selling breast-milk substitutes to developing countries and Dominion Stores for marketing California grapes picked by cheap, non-union migrant Mexican workers who endured shameful living conditions. It arranged meetings and consultations with corporate executives and managers, sent representatives to shareholder meetings, voted proxies, cornered politicians, testified at parliamentary committees, produced study kits, publicized information designed to embarrass the established interests, published articles and, after 1980, a periodical, Needle’s Eye, held workshops and conferences, organized demonstrations, and advertised boycotts. It pushed for a social audit of the shareholdings of General Synod. It joined with other churches to run two other socially radical groups: the Taskforce on the Churches and Corporate Responsibility and GATT-fly, which advocated international economic justice in the context of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The Canadian churches’ campaign against the banks, exploration companies, farm equipment companies, and other enterprises that profited from apartheid in South Africa has been documented in an absorbing study by one of its leaders.41

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Retreat Practically, the Church’s confrontational approach toward the government and the country’s influential corporate citizens could not be sustained indefinitely; it was too costly for the Church. Clergy, for their part, knew that promotion was more likely to come from running a parish efficiently and contributing to diocesan activities than by earning a reputation for community rabble-rousing. Moreover, in the later 1980s and early 1990s, as legal claims and lawsuits mounted against churches for clergy malpractice, abuse, maladministration of Indian residential schools, and other injuries, the Anglican Church lost much of the credibility it needed if it were to instruct politicians and corporate executives on moral behavior. Besides, after responding to the incessant flow of legal and personnel problems, few Anglican leaders had the time or resources to take significant new social initiatives; social ministry was not a priority when the Church was falling apart. Then, too, as sociologists such as Peter Berger were saying, religion in a specialized consumer society was a niche activity about spirituality and not an integrated way of life. What brought many to the Anglican Church was its style of parish fellowship and liturgy. Those interested in improving society could always turn to such charitable organizations as Amnesty International and the United Way. By the 1990s, the Anglican Church had lost much of its energy for social advocacy, although it confronted Talisman Energy of Calgary on its links with massive human rights violations in Sudan and Hydro-Québec on its plans for huge dams that would submerge First Nations lands at James Bay. The National Executive Council developed advocacy guidelines, partly to encourage the Anglican Church in its social vision but partly also to keep the advocacy under control. Some Anglican seminaries turned from teaching an ethical conscience in pastoral issues to meta-ethics, the academic discipline of analyzing the norms, methods, and data required for sound decision making. Among community services, Anglicans continued to administer hospitals, schools, shelters, and other programs but at a reduced level and with strained resources. A new initiative was the healing fund for victims of Indian residential schools (chapter 1), but that arose not so much from a fresh vision of the Church’s role in society as from recognition that its role in society in previous years had been deeply flawed.

Conclusion The Anglican Church in Canada has always connected its identity with its role in society. But through its history its role in society has changed, and each change has involved the Anglican community in the discussion and debate of old questions in new contexts. Until the 1850s, most Anglican leaders understood the social role of the

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anglicans in canada Church according to the English model of Anglicanism adapted to the situation of BNA. They saw themselves as stewards of a public institution thoroughly woven into the social fabric and supported by the English public through missionary societies, the imperial government, and landed endowments. They wanted it to teach British North Americans civic virtues and inculcate in them the loyalty and the spiritual and moral character necessary for a strong, healthy, and prosperous colony. They wanted it to support the English constitution, provide essential social services, run universities of an Anglican character, and cover the entire country with parish churches—all at public expense. However successful such a system might have been in a country of Anglicans, in a multidenominational society it led to insurmountable religious rivalries and political jealousies. In fact, many if not most lay Anglicans were themselves antiestablishmentarian and disagreed with their leaders’ vision. Anglican life was accordingly characterized by sometimes heated debates between Whiggish evangelicals and Tory high-churchers about the Church’s proper role in society. In that respect, Anglo-Catholics agreed more with Whiggish evangelicals than Tory high-churchers and helped swing the Canadian Church toward the American model of Anglican identity. By Confederation in 1867 the quasiestablishment was entirely dismantled, and the Anglican Church in Canada was legally a voluntary society. But the English model—that the Church was a part of society and that its teaching was profoundly relevant to the quality of life beyond its doors—continued and preserved Canadian Anglicanism from a sectarian spirit. Having lost their special status in the 1860s, many (although, as usual, not all) Anglicans in the following century were inclined to exercise their role in society collaboratively with other denominations. Canada depended on churches for social services and welfare, and Anglican dioceses and parishes were weariless in good works. In addition, Anglicans now believed that it was not enough to be part of the social order and care for its victims. It was even more important to improve the social order so there would not be so many victims to care for. Anglican leaders and councils for social service sought to work collaboratively with government and business to change social and economic structures and policies. In this period, Anglicans debated what a more fully Christian Canada would look like and how it could be built. The debate was conspicuous in sessions of synods, in church periodicals and pulpits, and elsewhere. During the Great Depression of the 1930s all parties came to realize that the tasks were far too overwhelming for churches to carry, and during the 1940s the Canadian government, like the English government and to a lesser extent the U.S. government, moved toward the model of what was sometimes called the welfare state. Anglicans continued many of their social ministries, but they were no longer so vital to the community. By the 1960s, and with increasing non-Christian immi-

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questions about the church in society gration and secularization, government and business were ceasing to regard churches as partners in social leadership. In post-Christian Canada, most Anglicans continued to believe that God’s love in Jesus Christ had inescapable implications for the social order, but to a great extent their Church had lost the power to be heard and taken seriously. In the 1970s and early 1980s in particular, but also to a smaller extent in the 1990s and early 2000s, Anglican leaders exercised the Church’s ministry of social leadership in some adversarial ways. Ordinary Anglicans debated that approach, often with great heat, and many left their churches or reduced or cancelled donations in protest. In the early 2000s as in the early 1800s, one part of the Church’s identity was its sense of duty to proclaim and minister God’s justice and compassion in Canadian society. Another part was to debate what that duty was and how it should be discharged in contemporary social circumstances. Should the Church minister to victims? Confront wrong-doers? Improve social structures? Administer social services? Offer theological reflection on social life? Develop justiceloving parish fellowships? What were the priorities? In that respect as in others, Anglican identity was to be found in the ways Anglicans disagreed about a question whose importance they all recognized.

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Notes 1. Reginald V. Harris, The Church of Saint Paul in Halifax, Nova Scotia: 1749–1949 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1949), 29–30. 2. Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966– ), 5: 167–72 (hereafter DCB). 3. John Graves Simcoe, Correspondence, vol. 3: 1794–1795, ed. E. A. Cruikshank [Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1925], 109. 4. For Inglis’s biography, the best choice is Brian Cuthbertson, The First Bishop: A Biography of Charles Inglis (Halifax: Waegwoltic Press, 1987). 5. John Wolfe Lydekker, The Life and Letters of Charles Inglis, His Ministry in America and Consecration as First Colonial Bishop, from 1759 to 1787 (London: SPCK, 1936), 225–26. 6. Peter M. Doll, Revolution, Religion, and National Identity: Imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 155–209; Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 7. John Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984). 8. The injunctions are printed in H. C. [Henry Coleridge] Stuart, The Church of England in Canada, 1759–1793, from the Conquest to the Establishment of the See of Quebec (Montreal: by J. Lovell for the author, 1893), 73–75, available as Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 24404. 9. Thomas R. Millman, Jacob Mountain, First Lord Bishop of Quebec: A Study in Church and State, 1793–1825 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1947).

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anglicans in canada 10. Millman, Jacob Mountain, esp. chs. 13, 16; Thomas R. Millman, The Life of the Right Reverend, the Honourable Charles James Stewart, D.D., Oxon., Second Anglican Bishop of Quebec (London, Ont.: Huron College, 1953), esp. chs. 8, 11, 12; Alan Wilson, The Clergy Reserves of Upper Canada: A Canadian Mortmain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). 11. Alan Wilson, “Glebe and School Lands in Nova Scotia and Upper Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 33 (1990): 39–48 (hereafter JCCHS). 12. J. J. Talman, “The Position of the Church of England in Upper Canada, 1791–1840,” Canadian Historical Review 15 (1934): 361–75 (hereafter CHR). 13. “Landed Endowments for Religious Purposes,” CHR 15 (1934): 406–14. 14. Millman, Jacob Mountain, 134. 15. Charles Prestwood Lucas, Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 2: 176. 16. Among many others are J. L. H. Henderson, John Strachan, 1778–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969) and DCB 9: 751–66. John Moir, who has published several articles on Strachan in JCCHS and CHR, is at work on a full-length biography. 17. William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario (Toronto: McGill–Queens University Press, 1989), 20. 18. “John Inglis,” DCB 7: 431–36, quotation on 434. 19. Millman, The Life of . . . Charles James Stewart, 78. 20. Arthur G. Doughty and Norah Story, eds., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1819–1828 (Ottawa: J. O. Patenaude, printer to the King, 1935), 377–85. 21. Quoted in Donald Creighton, Dominion of the North: A History of Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), 224. 22. Millman, Jacob Mountain, 71–72. 23. S. D. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), 121–22. 24. DCB 10: 278–81, quotation on 278. 25. Quoted in Thomas R. Millman and A. R. Kelley, Atlantic Canada to 1900: A History of the Anglican Church (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1983), 53; on Medley see DCB 12: 713– 17. 26. Herbert J. J. Coleman, Public Education in Upper Canada (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1907). 27. Millman, Jacob Mountain, 98. 28. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada, 125. 29. Charles E. Riley, Derwyn Trevor Owen: Primate of All Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966), 84. 30. Frank A. Peake, The Anglican Church in British Columbia (Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1959), 34–35. 31. C. W. Vernon, The Old Church in the New Dominion: The Story of the Anglican Church in Canada (London: SPCK, 1929), 209. 32. General Synod Journal (1911): 235 (hereafter GSJ). 33. Duff Crerar, “The Church in the Furnace: Canadian Anglican Chaplains Respond to the Great War,” JCCHS 35 (1993): 75–104; see also Duff Crerar, Padres in No Man’s Land: Canadian Chaplains in the Great War (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1995), 192. 34. Canon XIV, GSJ (1905): 350–51.

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questions about the church in society

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35. The postwar discussion of social welfare by Anglicans and others in Canada was guided by the 1945 report of Leonard Marsh, Report on Social Security for Canada, “Social History of Canada, 24” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975). This, in turn, was influenced by Great Britain. Inter-departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, Social Insurance and Allied Services: Report by Sir William Beveridge (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1942). 36. Keith Clifford, “His Dominion: A Vision in Crisis,” in Religion and Culture in Canada, ed. Peter Slater ([Toronto?]: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 1977), 23–42. 37. GSJ (1943): 60; William Wallace Judd, “The Vision and the Dream: Fifty Years of the Council for Social Service, Church of England in Canada,” JCCHS 7 (1965): 76–118, quotation on 95; Alan Davies, How Silent Were the Churches? Canadian Protestanism and the Jewish Plight during the Nazi Era (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998). 38. Leonard F. Hatfield, Sammy the Prince: The Story of Samuel Henry Prince (Hantsport, N.S.: Lancelot Press, 1990), 128–29. 39. Lalonde was participating in the Montreal and Ottawa Conference, United Church of Canada, Lennoxville, Quebec, June 3, 1975. 40. Elspeth Alley, Call Me Ted ([Canada]: Brenda Stenson, Best Business Solutions, 1992). 41. Renate Pratt, In Good Faith: Canadian Churches against Apartheid (Waterloo, Ont.: Canadian Corporation for the Study of Religion, 1997).

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chapter 3

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Questions about Church Governance Governance in the Anglican Church in Canada has always been diffuse and untidy. By “governance” is meant the constituted ways by which the Church makes institutional decisions and assigns authority. It includes structures of decision making, lines of accountability, job descriptions, and spheres of jurisdiction. Anglicans have questioned precisely what were, or should be, the jurisdiction and authority of primates, metropolitans, bishops, colonial secretaries, the law officers of the Crown, governors, colonial councils of various descriptions, various Canadian courts of law, the Privy Council in England, secretaries of mission societies, vestries, parish clergy and staff, church wardens, General Synod, provincial synods, diocesan synods, the staffs of synodical boards and committees, the imperial parliament in England, the various provincial legislatures, after 1867 the dominion parliament, and other persons and groups. Sometimes questions have arisen because some claimed an authority for themselves or for the Church that others thought that they should not have. Sometimes questions have arisen because two or more persons or bodies were claiming the same responsibility and authority. Sometimes questions have arisen because everyone was eager to leave responsibility and authority to someone else. All this was true in the eighteenth century, and it is true today. In short, Canadian Anglicans have over and over again questioned how the Anglican Church should be governed. The history of Anglican governance in Canada can be divided into three periods, each with its dominant model of governance and each framing the perennial questions of Anglican governance in ways specific to the surrounding circumstances. From the 1780s to the 1860s, the Anglican Church had an “imperial” model of organization, dependent on the prerogative of the Crown. From the 1860s to the 1960s, it had a “polity” model, combining monarchical, oligarchic, and democratic principles. Since the 1960s, a “bureaucratic” model has prevailed. Like all models, these are only abstractions, identifying certain

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questions about church governance publicly espoused principles and dominant characteristics; the actual historical processes of governing have been inconsistent, conflicting, and uncertain. Moreover, many Anglicans in each period critiqued the dominant model. Both the theoretical tendencies and the actual untidiness have been essential to Canadian Anglican identity, and so have been Anglican questions about them.

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The Imperial Period The imperial character of England was affirmed in one of the most important acts of parliament of the English Reformation. The Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 began: “Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king, having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporalty, be bounden and ought to bear, next to God, a natural and humble obedience.”1 The theory that the act enunciated was that the kings and queens of England were head of both church and state. Henry VIII and his successors claimed the powers of Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, who might lead a military expedition one day and settle a dispute about an episcopal election the next, or make decisions about the value of coinage and chair a meeting of bishops drafting doctrinal definitions. During the time that the Anglican Church in BNA was established or quasi-established, its governance was founded on the assumption of empire. The king or queen—the emperor—appointed the bishops until the 1850s in the overseas colonies of England (chapter 2). Bishops worked in connection with other authorities appointed by the king or queen, including the colonial secretary and the provincial governor. Church law in England applied to the Colonies, except when law officers of the Crown discerned legal reasons why it should not. To most of the rest of the world Anglican bishops in BNA might seem to have immense power. The royal letters patent delivered to Bishop Charles Inglis (Document 14) gave him authority to institute clergy to benefices, to license them, to enquire into behavior and morals, to punish delinquents, and in general to exercise full ecclesiastical and spiritual jurisdiction under the laws of England and the canons of the Church. But the bishops themselves felt largely powerless in their office. Everything they might want to do raised questions about policy and authority and process and therefore required the scrutiny of governors, provincial executive councils, colonial secretaries, and English Church officials. Who was really in charge? Officials debated it and in the absence of solid agreement negotiated how to work around their disagreements and uncertainties. Calling a meeting, appointing a parish priest, requesting a donation, things that Canadian Methodist or Presbyterian judicatories could do with relative

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anglicans in canada speed and ease, launched an Anglican bishop into a politically complicated, diplomatically delicate, time-consuming process of consultation and strategy. And because imperial politics, which pervaded everything, might at any time change course, nothing was certain. Did the Anglican Church benefit from a princely endowment of millions of acres of land? An act of the legislature could atomize it. Did it receive thousands of pounds sterling a year through the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) for clergy stipends? A decision in London could put an end to it. Did the bishop want to promote one of his priests to a rectorship? The governor could intervene with his own candidate. Did he want to appoint an archdeacon to assist with administration? London would need to give approval. Did he want to consult with his clergy and laity, assembled in synod? It was against the law—at least it appeared to be. No one was quite certain. In short, the limitations of the imperial system were unmistakably clear by the 1830s.

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The Road to Self-Government The Church took the road to self-government because it was forced to do so.2 Disendowed, disestablished, and displaced from the corridors of power and privilege, it found itself thrown on its own resources (chapter 2). Anglicans in BNA knew that they needed to clarify and develop constitutional structures and processes, but they were not of one mind as to how to go about it. The closest precedent in the Anglican world was the Episcopal Church in the United States, but it had been blessedly free of all English law and lawyers and theories of establishment and had been free to do what it wanted. Besides, the Episcopal Church was no longer related to the Church of England, whereas Anglicans in BNA treasured being part of the Church of England and feared to take any steps by which their connections might be severed. Progress was slow and inconsistent, and at every step change was attended by conflict, uncertainty, and unexpected complexities. In 1836 two important things happened: an influential, in some ways prophetic, booklet was published (Document 18) and a new instrument of Church governance was created. The booklet was a remarkably prophetic document written, anonymously, by Thomas Brock Fuller (1810–84), then a twenty-fiveyear-old minister in small-town Upper Canada.3 He urged his bishop and fellow clergy to make radical changes in the way the Church was organized, financed, and led, for the days were coming soon, or indeed had already arrived, when the old order would pass. Fuller was not the first to say any one of the things he did. He exhorted the Church to become self-supporting through the voluntary givings of members. That was not new. St. Paul’s, Halifax, had started canvassing its members for voluntary contributions in 1788, and the colonial secretary had been warning the Colonies for years that imperial support would be declining. Other denom-

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questions about church governance inations had been telling Anglicans to look after themselves instead of living off their fellow colonists. And Fuller wanted the Church to develop self-government through synods of clergy and lay representatives. That was not a new idea, either. John Strachan and others in Canada, in England, and in other British colonies had been saying something roughly similar over the past five years. Moreover, the Episcopal Church in the United States was already governed by diocesan and national conventions, the successors of the regional meetings of SPG clergy in colonial days (Document 1, “Upon Their Arrival,” rule 12). Fuller spoke of providing more churches and clergy for the increasing population, raising an endowment for the bishop’s salary, and opening seminaries. None of those ideas was new, either. He was contributing to a discussion that was already well underway. But he deserves credit for consolidating all the concerns and suggestions and questions of the day into an integrated vision for the future of Canadian Anglicanism, arguing his case cogently, and addressing objections that were bound to be raised. Fuller, born in Kingston, was orphaned at seven and attended John Strachan’s grammar school at York; he studied for ordination on an SPG scholarship at a kind of seminary for the diocese of Quebec at Chambly. He was ordained priest in 1835 and married a wealthy heiress who freed him from financial worries. He assisted briefly at Christ Church, Montreal, and pastored a succession of churches in Upper Canada. He served additional appointments as rural dean and archdeacon. He was evangelical in his theological sympathies, but with a few exceptions that seem to have been inadvertent he steered clear of Anglican party politics. When the laity of the diocese of Toronto looked for an evangelical episcopal candidate in 1868, they turned to him. He lost that election but was elected the first bishop of Niagara in 1875. Fuller’s pamphlet of 1836 was attacked by many who thought that his plan gave excessive authority to the laity, or that it would separate church from state, or that it would be against the law. In 1839 John Strachan, while in England to be consecrated bishop, was told by eminent authorities that to try to create a colonial synod would lead him into a constitutional quagmire. A large problem was a statute passed during the English Reformation (25 Henry VIII cap. 19), which prohibited church convocations without the king’s writ and the enacting of canons without his assent. Anglicans in other colonies were wrestling with similar issues; Bishop George Selwyn went bravely ahead and held a synod of clergy in 1844 in New Zealand. The second event of 1836 that opened the road to self-government was the organization of the first “church society,” which would quickly become a characteristic institution of colonial Anglicanism. Church societies were primarily instruments for funding and administering missions (chapter 1). In bringing together bishops, clergy, and laypeople around a common task, they taught them to work together in governance. True, bishops had the power of veto, but Bishop John Medley of Fredericton, for one, was proud to say that he had never used

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anglicans in canada it. Through church societies, Canadian Anglicans also learned some of the arts of church management—planning, evaluation, publicity, fund-raising, and investment strategy—as well as the specifics of church architecture. But church societies were intrinsically limited as instruments of ecclesiastical government. Many who were communicants in their parish church did not belong to the church society, and those who were not communicants could belong to the church society. Thus church societies could not pretend to speak for the Church. They could not deal with doctrine, worship, or discipline. They had no authority to develop Church policy or make rules or canons. For these functions, forms of true ecclesiastical government would need to be devised.

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The Polity Model What would a colonial Anglican Church government be like? To a well-educated, politically experienced early Victorian Anglican, except for an ultra-Tory one, the most viable alternatives would be variations on what Aristotle had called the polity model. Aristotle had found problems with each of his teacher Plato’s models—chiefly monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—and showed his preference for a hybrid structure, which he called “polity,” meaning constitutional government. Republican Rome had been an excellent historical example of such a governance. The two consuls exercised the monarchical authority of the former kings. The Senate embodied the aristocratic principle, and the Assembly of Centuries and the Assembly of Tribes were democratic. England had adapted this mixed, or polity, model. Thus the influential Anglican theologian William Paley (chapter 2) explained that the monarchical principle was found in the king or queen, the aristocratic principle in the House of Lords, and the democratic principle lurked behind the House of Commons, although, Paley acknowledged, the democratic principle, given the bizarre variety of ways in which people attained membership in the House of Commons, was defective in the English constitution. The architects of the U.S. Constitution had similarly borrowed from Aristotle, Rome, and England when they designed the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. John Adams in 1787 declared the theory of the English constitution “the most stupendous fabric of human invention” and added that the Americans “ought to be applauded . . . for imitating it, as far as they have.” American Anglicans imitated it in the governance of the Episcopal Church, creating “conventions” with bishop, clergy, and lay delegates.4 Not entirely coincidentally, as Anglicans were reflecting in the 1840s on what form their Church government might take, the general populace of BNA was giving consideration to the colonial government. Before the 1840s, England governed its colonies by appointing a governor and an executive council, usually Anglican and usually Tory, who answered to colonial secretaries in London. It also let the qualified men of the province elect a legislative assembly, which had very limited powers. By the 1830s, Whiggish Canadians were agitating for a

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questions about church governance system of “responsible government” by which provincial government would be delegated by and accountable to a legislative assembly elected by the people, as in the British Parliament. The Colonial Office in Britain gave its blessing to this new approach in 1847. Because many Canadian school texts—and some more scholarly books as well—picture Anglicans of the day as committed to the ultra-Tory past, it is important to stress that several Anglican laypeople in Canada were conspicuous in the movement for change. One, William Henry Draper (1801–77), was virtually the premier of Canada from 1844 to 1847, and his government was the first to stand on the confidence of the Assembly. Another was Joseph Howe (1804–73) of Nova Scotia, which became in 1848 the first British colony to achieve formal responsible government. Robert Baldwin (1804–58) was the most influential early theoretician of the movement and one of the two leaders of the “Great Ministry,” which in 1848 inaugurated responsible government in the Province of Canada. George Coles (1810–75) brought responsible government to Prince Edward Island in 1851. Samuel Leonard Tilley (1818–96) played a leading role in bringing responsible government to New Brunswick in 1855. Robert J. Parsons (1802–83), a newspaper editor and legislator, helped turn public opinion toward responsible government in Newfoundland in 1855.5 To be sure, most bishops had Tory, high-church inclinations and did not disguise their distaste for these novelties, but many—probably, most—Anglican politicians readily joined with non-Anglicans in opposing the old system. By the late 1840s, as “responsible government” was being initiated in the Colonies and as Anglicans in BNA were becoming thoroughly frustrated by their leisurely and ambiguous system of Church administration, momentum gathered toward a polity government for colonial Anglicanism. In 1850 an Anglican member of the legislative council of Canada, Peter Boyle de Blaquiere (1783– 1860), presented arguments and proposed a bill for a diocesan government— much to the annoyance of Anglican officialdom, with whom he had not consulted. In the spring of 1851 an assembly of clergy and laypeople in Toronto called for a synod. By then, all the bishops of Canada and the Atlantic provinces were committed to moving toward the American Episcopal system of conciliar government, adapted to the situation of a British province. At first sight it may seem odd that just these die-hard episcopal autocrats were burning to create structures that would soon be setting limits to episcopal authority. All six of the bishops of 1851—Edward Feild of Newfoundland, Herbert Binney (1819–87) of Nova Scotia, John Medley of Fredericton, George Mountain (1789–1863) of Quebec, Francis Fulford (1803–68) of Montreal, and John Strachan of Toronto—were high church or tractarian in outlook. Most of them were accustomed to ruling imperiously. Why would they want to create a Church constitution that would throw them on their skills of negotiation and require them to ask their clergy and laity for permission to speak and act on behalf of the Church?

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anglicans in canada The answer is that they never envisioned a system so wildly democratic as the one that finally emerged, one in which synods could pass resolutions on practically anything they pleased, including doctrine, and initiate Church legislation and set constitutional limits on the prerogative of bishops. What they envisioned was a Tory version of a polity system where bishops led, clergy supported, and laypeople followed. The laity would learn from their spiritual teachers, raise funds, and undertake helpful political advocacy with secular officials. In October 1836, at a clergy meeting in Toronto, John Strachan recommended a diocesan “convention” in which lay delegates would have only “limited power, in no case extending to spiritual things.”6 In his first charge to his clergy as bishop in 1841, he reiterated that the laity had no right to a voice in the assemblies of the Church on spiritual or doctrinal issues, a conviction he probably maintained to his dying day. The role of the laity was “merely as witnesses, or as executors of the decrees that are adopted.” Unlike Fuller, Strachan did not admire the “dangerous” system of the Episcopal Church, which he thought was characterized by a weak episcopate forced upon the Episcopal Church by an obstreperous laity at the Revolution before there were any bishops to steer things better.7 The bishops came together in Quebec for a historic meeting from September 23 to October 1, 1851, almost exactly a year after the bishops of Australia and New Zealand, faced with identical issues, had met for the same purposes in Sydney and reached some helpful conclusions.8 For years, some BNA bishops had been suggesting just such a conference. Of the six, the only absentee was Binney, who had just barely arrived in Halifax as bishop. Of course, the bishop of Rupert’s Land, who lived a universe away, was absent as well. The declaration they produced identified a small mountain of administrative problems and loose ends, all largely beyond their ability to repair because of the “anomalous” and confused state of Church government (Document 19). Yes, these bishops knew their minds and could act decisively, but, they complained, whatever they said or did appeared to be their own saying and doing, not the Church’s. With the support of synods, bishops would have to be taken more seriously. Take clergy reserves, they might have said. Synods overflowing with railway presidents, bank executives, civic officials, and wealthy merchants would be able to persuade colonial legislators and British government ministers to maintain the rights of the Anglican Church. But who paid attention to a bishop?

The Synodical System The archbishop of Canterbury was cool to the Declaration of 1851. Bishops Mountain, Binney, and Feild, with a few bishops from some of the other British colonies, traveled to London in early 1853 to meet with him and eighteen other English bishops. As a result, the archbishop introduced in the House of Lords a bill to give legal effect to colonial Anglican synods. The bill passed there but was defeated by the House of Commons. There were those who thought that

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questions about church governance synods should be tried first in the mother country before they were given to the Colonies. Others feared that synods would give bishops too much power or make them too independent of the Crown. The colonial secretary advised the colonials to find other ways to arrange synods. John Strachan was the first to do so. He called a meeting (a “visitation”) of his clergy and lay delegates from each parish for October 1853. Strachan had been holding visitations for as long as he had been bishop; visitations, unlike synods, had been legal for many centuries. But there was also business to consider: the clergy reserves question, the division of the diocese into two smaller dioceses, and the recent founding of Trinity College. And once the visitation was convened, members by some prearrangement constituted themselves into a synod by passing a resolution: “That this meeting, convened by the Lord Bishop, and composed firstly, of the Lord Bishop of the Diocese; secondly, of the Clergy of this Diocese, and thirdly, of the Lay representatives of the several congregations of the Diocese, are the Diocesan Synod of this diocese, and that we now proceed to the transaction of the business which we have commenced. Carried unanimously and with acclamation.” 9 The following year, the synod passed a declaration of principles (Document 20) and a constitution. The diocese of Nova Scotia formed a synod and adopted an almost identical declaration of principles and constitution in 1855. Some day, when a general synod was formed for a national Church, it, too, would look to the Toronto declaration of principles as its chief model. Outside Toronto, many Anglicans fiercely opposed the synodical movement for reasons of Church style (chapter 4). Synods were widely feared as a very large step toward rule by bishops. The fact that bishops were high-church or tractarian seemed suspicious. Because bishops themselves were looking to synodical government to give them the coercive authority they thought they needed to discipline recalcitrant clergy, the worries were possibly justified. Perhaps the laity would lose its effectual right to appeal over the heads of bishops to governors and colonial secretaries. The protest of at least one parish in Nova Scotia has been preserved (Document 21). In Quebec City, agitation against the synod led on one occasion to a riot that required police intervention. In the diocese of Fredericton (that is, New Brunswick), the bishop met so much opposition that he gave up the idea of synods until 1868. Probably the most controversial single point about synods was the proposal that the bishop should have the authority to veto any and every decision. This feature represented a high-church adaptation of the American model of Anglicanism. The principle of episcopal veto focused attention on a deeper question: What was the purpose of synods? Evangelicals wanted them to be constitutional expressions of the “priesthood of all believers,” where the spiritual authority of all members of the Church would be recognized. High-church Anglicans and tractarians wanted them to be constitutional expressions of the spiritual authority of the bishop and clergy, in which the laity did not share. Synods, therefore, became a chief battling-point in “churchmanship” quarrels (chapter 4).

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anglicans in canada The episcopal veto was debated first in the Toronto synod and then in the other synods—and always with considerable feeling. Evangelicals observed that no one had a veto in meetings of the Colonial and Continental Church Society (Col. & Con.) or in the diocesan conventions in the Episcopal Church, except in Vermont. But the Col. & Con. was evangelical and the Episcopal Church had been largely Whiggish, whereas the ethos north of the border was dominated by high-church and tractarian bishops and clergy beholden to them. Synod after synod voted to accept the episcopal veto, but never unanimously. A partial exception is that the synod of Nova Scotia in 1874 provided for an appeal from the bishop’s veto to the House of Bishops. Whether these synods had any legal standing was at first open to question. The legislature of Victoria in Australia passed an enabling act for Anglican synods in 1854, and when the queen gave her assent in 1855 Anglicans in other colonies were reassured. In 1856 Anglican lawyers succeeded in having the legislature of Canada pass a statute enabling synods (Document 22). The legislation was referred to Britain for the royal assent. There, law officers, perplexed, turned to the highest court in the land, the judicial committee of the privy council, for a definitive opinion. The result was that the act received royal assent in 1857. The dioceses of Huron, Quebec, and Montreal, which were located within the jurisdiction of the Province of Canada, moved toward forming synods immediately afterward. In Huron, the decision was made uneventfully in 1858. In Quebec, the decision was delayed by strident challenges from evangelical laypeople who charged that it was discriminatory to seat all the clergy but only a small selection of laypeople. They pointed to the precise wording of the Act of 1856, which provided for meetings of “Bishops, Clergy, and Laity,” not “Bishops, Clergy, and Lay Representatives.” The bishop of Quebec conceded that they might have a technical legal point on their side and delayed organizing his synod until he could have a further clarifying statute enacted by the legislature. Quebec organized its synod in 1859, Montreal in the same year, and Ontario in 1862. In Nova Scotia, Anglican critics heavily opposed the bishop’s first attempt in the provincial legislature to have his synod recognized, and it failed. It was reported that his only supporters in the legislature were four non-Anglicans. A second attempt succeeded in 1863, but only when special clauses were added to the bill to protect the rights of the dissenting parishes. Three parishes refused to be represented at synod for fifteen years. Synods were formed in Fredericton in 1868, Rupert’s Land in 1869, Newfoundland in 1873, British Columbia in 1875, and other dioceses as they were created—except for missionary dioceses, which were not self-governing. Synods, once created, took on a life of their own. It was dismaying to more than one bishop that they did not evince the sort of tractability and deference to their spiritual fathers in God that might have been hoped. Indeed, they became a forum where all the controversies of the diocese and province were open-

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questions about church governance ly aired and then published in the daily press. Even more dismaying, synods began to exercise real authority. In less than a decade they had assumed three particularly critical powers. First, the synod of Toronto passed a canon in 1857, enabling itself to elect bishops, a decision which, Strachan observed to his synod the following year, “excited wonder and astonishment.”10 In 1857 members of the Toronto synod who lived in the western part of the diocese, which was about to be separated into the new diocese of Huron, elected their first bishop. In 1861 members of the Toronto synod who lived in the eastern part of the diocese did the same for the new diocese called Ontario.11 At first, because the Crown still claimed the right to appoint the bishops of the imperial established Church, a somewhat devious procedure was devised to give effect to episcopal elections. Bishop Strachan would commend successful candidates to the governor-general of Canada, who in turn would commend them to the Colonial Office, which in turn would order up letters patent for them. The legalities were soon simplified. Second, synods sought legal incorporation, beginning with Ontario in 1862. Previously, it was usual for a bishop to be made a “corporation sole,” a strange beast of law that gave him and each of his successors a corporate status as the incumbent of an office, separate from his legal characteristics as a human being. The scope for episcopal prerogative was greatly reduced as soon as synods owned a diocese’s property and managed its finances. Third, synods began to create canon law. The Act of 1856 in the Province of Canada empowered the synod to “make regulations for enforcing discipline in the Church.” Whether the lawyers who drafted the act fully recognized how broadly this clause was framed, and its implications for the restriction of episcopal authority, is not known. The diocese of Toronto was quick off the mark with a committee on canons, which by 1858 had thoroughly investigated the canon law of the Church of England and determined that very little of it was applicable to Canada. They proceeded to draft a new code of canon law, which the synod accepted. In future years, civil courts would hold bishops accountable to the terms of the canons, not because they were really “law” in a civil sense but because they represented a form of contract among members of a voluntary association. An important precedent was set in Johnson v. Glen in 1879. The second bishop of Toronto had attempted to appoint an incumbent to a church without strictly following the procedures laid out in the canon, and the court voided the appointment. Another important case was Halliwell v. Synod of Ontario in 1881, when the first bishop of Ontario sought to remove a parish priest without conforming to canonical procedure. The incumbent returned to his church.12 It became a principle of law that once bishops had given up any piece of authority to their synods, they could not reclaim it. Because of the intervention of civil courts—definitely not because of the intentions of the bishops who had championed the synodical system in the 1850s—a constitutional episcopacy was born.

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anglicans in canada Synods thus became far more than the kind of advisory committee to the bishop and machine for fund-raising and public advocacy that their earliest episcopal proponents had envisioned. Through much controversy, and quite unexpectedly, they achieved a very real authority of their own.

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The First Provincial Synods Until 1860 all the bishops of BNA were still subject to the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury as the metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province, which also included most of England as well as all overseas British colonies. In their “Declaration” of 1851 (Document 19), they proposed a “council under a provincial metropolitan” for all the dioceses of BNA together. An ecclesiastical province for BNA would promote the collaboration of BNA dioceses in matters of common concern as a very helpful and natural step toward efficient selfgovernment. True, it would unseat the archbishop of Canterbury as the metropolitan (that is, the bishop at the head of an ecclesiastical province), but he would continue as primate (the bishop at the head of the entire Church). The Act of 1856 of the Province of Canada had authorized Anglicans to gather in a provincial synod. In 1859 the diocesan synods of Quebec, Toronto, and Montreal passed resolutions requesting a provincial organization, and the Crown issued letters patent in July 1860, creating the ecclesiastical Province of Canada and appointing the bishop of Montreal the metropolitan. In September 1861 the bishop of Montreal then convened the first provincial synod for the Province of Canada. It was practically the final step in realizing ecclesiastical selfgovernment in the province. There remained, however, one misunderstanding to correct. The provincial synod seemed to derive its authority from the metropolitan, whose letters patent authorized him to convene it. New letters patent were obtained that provided that the powers conferred on the metropolitan were “subject to such rules, regulations and canons as shall or may be made in respect thereof” by the provincial synod.13 In 1870 and 1871 the Parliament of the young Dominion of Canada passed permissive legislation allowing the dioceses of Nova Scotia and Fredericton to join the provincial synod of Canada. Those dioceses stumbled somewhat in their initial efforts to comply with the terms of the legislation, but in 1874 they succeeded in taking their place in the Province of Canada.

The Collapse of the Imperial System At the same time that Canadian Anglicans were creating synods and debating what they should do with them, English judges were dramatically transforming the legal status of the Anglican Church in the British colonies.14 The imperial theory of colonial Anglicanism was the Tory theory: The colonial Church

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questions about church governance was the creature of royal prerogative. The Tory theory prevailed while Tory governments were in power, largely because the law officers of the Crown who told bishops what they could and could not do were Tory appointees. Tories controlled the British government almost continuously between 1760 and 1830, and during that period law officers declared that it was the king or queen—or, in practice, the staff of the Colonial Office—who could create dioceses, appoint bishops, and make policies for the Church. Liberals, however, took control of the British government in 1846 and held on to it almost continuously until 1866. The promulgation of a more constitutional theory of colonial Anglicanism could almost have been predicted. A decision in a case from South Africa abruptly annihilated the imperial model of the Church and drastically changed the course of Anglican history in Canada. In 1856 Robert Gray (1809–72), the very determined, very tractarian bishop of Capetown, decided to organize a synod. He instructed his clergy to come to his cathedral in January with lay delegates from their parishes.15 The parish of Mowbray, and its minister, the Rev. William Long, refused to recognize his authority to convene a synod. The so-called synod proceeded without the benefit of members from Mowbray and passed a constitution that dealt with forming parishes, inducting clergy, trying ecclesiastical offenses, and holding synods. In 1861 Gray called a second synod, this time appealing to the authority granted him by the first synod, which had legally enjoyed no authority other than what he as bishop had given it. Long and his parish once more refused to attend. Gray suspended Long from office and then a few weeks later convened an ecclesiastical court in which he himself served as prosecutor, judge, and jury. Gray found Long guilty in absentia of disobedience and contempt. He sentenced him to be deprived “of his charge, and cure of souls in . . . Mowbray, and of all emoluments belonging to the same.”16 Long sued but lost his case in the courts of Capetown. He appealed, and the case was heard by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England, which served as the highest court in the British Empire. Gray argued that his letters patent appointing him bishop had granted him coercive jurisdiction in his diocese; that, even if they did not, he had acted according to rules established by his synod; and that, even if he had not, Long at his ordination had voluntarily promised canonical obedience to his bishop, thus creating a contract. The Judicial Committee delivered its judgment on June 24, 1863. The Supreme Court of the Cape of Good Hope had already declared Gray’s letters patent invalid on the basis of a new principle: Once England had granted a colony self-government, the English government no longer had authority to appoint people to office in the colony. The Judicial Committee agreed. As for Gray’s synod, the Judicial Committee ruled it unlawful because by passing rules by which Long could be deprived of his livelihood it was exercising coercive jurisdiction, and no such jurisdiction had been given to it by any lawful authority. And as for Long’s oath of canonical obedience to his bishop, it covered only

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anglicans in canada “such commands as the Bishop by law is authorised to impose.” Long was not required to obey a summons, from a bishop who had no authority to issue it, to a meeting of an assembly that had no standing at law. An extract from the judgment is given in Document 23. The case had been a sensational one in South Africa, and now that it was decided the judgment sent a shock throughout the Anglican world. The powers the Crown had been giving colonial bishops for several decades could not legally be given; therefore, colonial bishops had been wielding authority they did not legally have. Law officers of the Crown began sending letters to the colonial bishops, explaining how their procedures would need to change. For years after June 1863 when bishops and clergy and synods and laypeople disagreed about questions of ecclesiastical authority, Long v. Gray was cited. The Church of England in a self-governing colony was not an imperial Church, and it was not an established Church. It had no greater constitutional or legal standing than any other denomination unless by special act of the local legislature. English church law did not apply. Bishops did not need letters patent from the queen for their appointment. The first BNA bishop to be consecrated without them was James Williams of Quebec in 1863. Bishops and clergy and laypeople had every right to get together to chat, but if they wanted to claim jurisdiction over other Anglicans and pass disciplinary regulations and set up tribunals, they had better obtain enabling legislation from the colonial government. The Judicial Committee was not through with colonial Anglicans. Six months after Long v. Gray had been decided, the same Bishop Gray delivered yet another sentence in absentia, this one removing John William Colenso as bishop of Natal. In this case, Gray was acting not as bishop of his diocese but as metropolitan of his province, still on the authority of letters patent. Colenso was the bishop of a diocese within Gray’s province. He had published books denying the eternal punishment of the damned, questioning tenets of sacramental theology dear to catholic Anglicans such as Gray, denying the doctrine of Christ’s vicarious sacrifice in the sense “that He endured in our stead the weight of God’s wrath,” and affirming that errors of fact existed in the Scriptures. These views may not sound radical now, but they were very alarming indeed in the 1860s and were certainly reckoned unworthy of a bishop. This case, too, was a sensational one and was also, on appeal, decided against Gray by the Judicial Committee. The lawyers reaffirmed that Gray’s letters patent giving him coercive jurisdiction as metropolitan were without effect. Although it might be true that the queen, as governor of the Church, could command the consecration of a bishop, she could not assign jurisdiction to the bishop in a self-governing colony. The legal point was quite similar to that of Long v. Gray, but the stakes were higher. It was one thing to allow a priest to stay home from synod but quite another to allow a bishop to publish heresy. Worldwide Anglicanism, between Long v. Gray and Colenso v. Gray, stood stripped of the institutional machinery it had thought it enjoyed to define and enforce standards of Christian discipline

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questions about church governance and orthodoxy. In 1865 this disturbing development appalled almost all the Anglican bishops in the world, and they were ablaze with sympathy for Gray. No group of bishops was more upset than those of the ecclesiastical Province of Canada, doctrinal conservatives to a man. John Travers Lewis, the bishop of Ontario, drafted a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury, and the provincial synod endorsed his message (Document 24). The Canadians urged Canterbury to convene a meeting of all bishops of the Anglican Communion to discuss the upsetting developments in South Africa. Lewis himself, and others, may well have hoped that together the bishops might construct new machinery to enforce orthodox doctrine and healthy discipline. But the prospect of an Anglican super-government had no appeal for bishops in England or the United States, who did not want their national structures of governance trumped by a higher authority. Still, a mere conference could do little damage. After appropriate consultations, the archbishop of Canterbury invited the bishops of the Anglican world to his London residence, Lambeth Palace, for conference in September 1867. It was the first of what proved to be a series of decennial Lambeth Conferences of Anglican bishops. The agenda was to include mutual counsel and encouragement, common worship, and conversation about practical questions and missionary work. The conferences would have no authority whatever to define doctrine or pass regulations. Over the course of years, however, Lambeth Conferences have acquired considerable moral authority. Two prime examples—the ordination of women as deaconesses and the ordination of women as priests— were discussed at Lambeth before they were discussed in the Anglican Church of Canada (chapter 6). In the aftermath of the Colenso affair it was obvious that the Anglican Church would develop as a family of self-governing churches very much like those of Eastern Orthodoxy. There would be no universal primacy. There would be no Vatican. There would be only symbols of unity, chief of which would be the archbishop of Canterbury. With this, Bishop Colenso ceased to be of importance to Canadians, except as an object of loathing. Gray, unimpressed with the reasoning of the Privy Council, proceeded to excommunicate Colenso anyway, and with very little dissent the bishops of the Province of Canterbury supported the “spiritual” validity of his deposition and authorized the appointment of a new bishop of Natal. So did they create a small fortune for some of the legal firms of South Africa and a schism that persisted for forty-five years.17 In summary, several developments between the mid-1850s and the late 1860s simplified the flow chart of Anglican authority in BNA. The imperial government removed itself from most matters of colonial government, including religious matters; the colonial legislatures extirpated all semblance of Church establishment; the law lords ended the authority of the Crown, Parliament, and Church of England in the affairs of colonial Anglicanism; and, finally, the bish-

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anglicans in canada ops of the worldwide communion determined that each branch of worldwide Anglicanism would be free of interference from any other branch. Canadian Anglicans found themselves, not entirely willingly, masters in their own house. They were a self-governing, voluntary association. At the parish level, the principal remaining elements of Canadian Anglican governance were minister, churchwardens, and vestry; at the diocesan level, bishop and synod; and at the provincial level, metropolitan and provincial synod. A great deal would now depend on the synods, yet at Canadian Confederation in 1867 the oldest of them was less than fifteen years old. Some dioceses had not yet created them. How synods should work, and what jurisdiction they should have, would continue to be discussed and debated.

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A Profile of Synods In their polity period Canadian Anglicans often called synods the “parliaments of the Church.” In a synod, representatives elected by Anglican parishioners joined clergy licensed by the bishop to discuss the issues of the day, with the bishop in the chair. The bishop could veto—that is, withhold his concurrence with—any resolution of synod. A synod could enact Church law, adopt the diocesan budget, and pass resolutions. It was a kind of legislative branch of the Church, like Parliament; bishops could be seen as the executive branch. But, despite first appearances, this was not really a parliamentary system. In Parliament, ministers of the Canadian government kept office only so long as they maintained the confidence of Parliament; bishops kept office no matter what their synods might think of them. That provision largely insulated them from real accountability. Anglican polity government in Canada entrenched several checks and balances. The laity were protected in that, in a voluntary Church, they provided most of the money and, if unhappy, could always leave. For their part, bishops had power because they controlled the agenda of synods, largely influenced clergy promotion, administered diocesan government, and personified the diocese. Clergy had power through their considerable influence at the parish level and their collegiality with other clergy. Actions of synods required concurrence. Representative democracy in the polity system should not be romanticized. The effectiveness of the system depended to a considerable extent on the personalities of the bishop, clergy, and lay leaders; their knowledge of things theological and ecclesiastical; their skill in debate; and the competence of committees and staffs. Autocratically minded bishops could bend synods to their will, although in that case, unless they were politically canny and personally popular, they risked losing their authority of moral leadership. John Strachan was the paradigm of the effective episcopal autocrat. Observers gave high marks to the debates of General Synod and most of the larger diocesan synods in the heyday of the polity period. Even today their pro-

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questions about church governance ceedings make impressive reading, for many of them were recorded almost verbatim in the Church press and even the secular press, like the Hansard reports of Parliament. Candid speaking was the rule to an extent that sometimes shocks modern sensibilities. The laity as well as the clergy were generally well versed in Bible and doctrine. Some of the most prominent and capable lay Anglicans of the day were prepared to sacrifice several days for the meetings. For effective debate it was helpful that synods were initially small. When General Synod began meeting, it had eighty-four members and no staff; by contrast, in 1980 it had 311 members and a small battalion of administrators, consultants, and resource people. In 1931, when General Synod met in Ottawa, a young deacon at the cathedral in the city came to observe. His name was Howard Clark, and almost forty years later, when he was primate, he recalled two things about that synod. One was its extraordinary intransigence to change, which he regretted. The other was the exceptional debating skill of its delegates.18

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Synods in the New Ecclesiastical Provinces At Canadian Confederation in 1867 there was as yet no provincial synod in western Canada. In eastern Canada, a provincial synod had been founded at the request of the member dioceses, which then joined in approving its constitution. The process was quite the opposite in Rupert’s Land. There the provincial synod existed before any of the dioceses except for the diocese of Rupert’s Land itself. In other words, dioceses in Rupert’s Land were created from the province, whereas the Province of Canada was created from the dioceses. The provincial level of ecclesiastical government consequently had a primary importance in Rupert’s Land but a subsidiary importance in Canada. This difference, at first sight a mere historical curiosity, created intractable difficulties that have persisted to this day whenever Anglicans have sought to interpret the authority of provincial synods. The chief actor in the creation of the provincial synod of Rupert’s Land was the remarkable Robert Machray (1831–1904), the second bishop of Rupert’s Land, who as a bachelor with excellent health and considerable energy poured himself unstintingly into the work of the Church and influenced it indelibly.19 Like Strachan, he was a Scot from Aberdeen who had Presbyterianism in his family background but chose the Church of England. Unlike Strachan, he was an evangelical, looked to the Episcopal Church in the United States for examples of an Anglicanism adapted to its North American social context, and never liked public speaking. Machray was a well-established, tenured scholar at Cambridge University when in 1865 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) invited him to become bishop of Rupert’s Land. He was thirty-four years old. He created his diocesan synod in 1869. Fourteen clergy and twenty lay delegates attended and approved a constitution that the forethoughtful bishop had already

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cleared with the CMS and the archbishop of Canterbury, his metropolitan. A few months later, Canada purchased Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Machray found himself engulfed in the Red River Rebellion. In 1870 Manitoba became a province and thus, for the purposes of Long v. Gray, a self-governing colony. It was clear to Machray that his diocese was too large for one bishop and needed to be divided. He devised an unprecedented new procedure. The old way, which had been followed in eastern Canada, had been to have the Crown issue letters patent creating two new dioceses out of one old one. But the Crown was no longer issuing letters patent for self-governing provinces. Instead, Machray would organize an ecclesiastical Province of Rupert’s Land and convene a provincial synod, which would itself create the new dioceses and give them bishops. Machray would become metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province. At his second diocesan synod in 1872, a canon was passed to divide the mother see of Rupert’s Land into four dioceses—one, centered on Winnipeg, retaining the old name of Rupert’s Land, plus three more: Athabasca, Moosonee, and Saskatchewan. Athabasca and Moosonee were in remote northern areas that might never be much populated by white settlers, and Machray sought the help of the CMS, the specialist in native ministries, to sponsor their new bishops. Saskatchewan would soon have a railway and a flood of British immigrants, and Machray looked to the SPG to sponsor the bishop there. His provincial synod met for the first time in 1875. The purpose of a strong provincial synod in Rupert’s Land was not, however, simply to make it possible to create new dioceses. The provincial synod would have a broad vision for mission that individual dioceses, wrapped up in their own affairs, might lack. A third ecclesiastical province, Ontario, was created in 1911 out of the Province of Canada. The dioceses of British Columbia finally managed to organize themselves into an ecclesiastical province in 1915.

Jurisdictional Issues In Canadian Anglican history, every step toward the clarification and tidying of authority has created more unclarities and more untidinesses and therefore more questions and more debates. When the provinces of Canada and Rupert’s Land assumed the powers of ecclesiastical self-government, uncertainties arose about their authority. Could they make decisions about doctrine and worship? If they did, would they not in effect be isolating themselves from the rest of the Anglican world? In fact, if they were too independent-minded, might they not find themselves in unintentional schism? Such concerns weighed on delegates to the provincial synod of Canada when they met in 1868 to address issues so explosive as to threaten the unity of the Church: liturgy, ritual, and ceremony. The lower house (the clerical and lay delegates) had been debating those topics for several days and built up quite a

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questions about church governance head of steam when, suddenly, a resolution was sent them from the upper house (the bishops) advising that they had no jurisdiction. The bishops had been seized with the scruple that liturgy was a matter of the Book of Common Prayer, that this had the authority of the Act of Uniformity of the English Parliament, that acts of Parliament had been received into Canada by the Constitutional Act of 1791, and that there was “a danger lest this Synod should unwittingly enact any Canon which should contravene said Act of Uniformity, and so sever the Church in this Province, from the said United Church of England and Ireland, of which we have solemnly declared ourselves an integral part.” Was that really the problem, or were they afraid that the clergy and laity would handle matters unwisely and create schism? The lower house was furious. A clerical member declared that the message was calculated “to destroy the independence of the Lower House.” A lay member said that he and his colleagues were not there “for the purpose of receiving spiritual instruction from their Fathers in God,” and if the bishops could “at any time send down a message and stop their discussion, then they offered a good argument for having no Synod.” Had not events of the previous few years proven that the Canadian Church was autonomous? Some lawyers were now advising that the only English ecclesiastical law that had force in Canada was that regarding marriage and divorce. Three eminent lawyers gave their opinion in writing: “It is within the competence of the Provincial Synod . . . to frame regulations for governing matters of order and detail in the ministrations of the Church.”20 Its indignation thus vented, the lower house finished deliberations and then passed a resolution on worship. The upper house, which had conquered its dithers, received it, negotiated some minor revisions, and obligingly concurred. The jurisdiction of the Canadian Church in its own affairs had been effectively reaffirmed, the powers of synodical government had been vindicated, and the constitutional restrictions on episcopal authority had been demonstrated once again. But none of this was definitive. Debates continued to flourish about the jurisdiction of the Church in general, the respective jurisdictions of the various levels of the Church, and the respective jurisdictions of various structures and personnel within each level.

General Synod By the middle of the 1880s, many Anglicans wanted a national Church rather than a network of provincial ones. The first formal proposal for what came to be called “church consolidation” was made by the choir director of Christ Church, Petrolia, Ontario, when he was a lay delegate from the diocese of Huron to the provincial synod of 1885. His name was Charles Jenkins, and he later came to be described as the father of General Synod. The proposal was timely for several reasons.

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anglicans in canada —Canada was confederated in 1867. The Anglican mind, then as now, tended to give geographical definition to ministry and organization, no doubt partly a residue of Church establishment. Anglicans in other former British colonies had created national churches, notably New Zealand (1859) and Australia and Tasmania (1872). —The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1885 made it possible for the first time to travel easily between eastern and western Canada. Before the 1860s, virtually the only way into Rupert’s Land was by Hudson’s Bay, and the only ships to Hudson’s Bay sailed from England. In 1841 an Anglican minister named Abraham Cowley had tried to reach Red River cross-country from Quebec, found the way impassable, and sailed back to England just in time to catch the annual ship to Hudson’s Bay. Bishop George Mountain did reach Red River overland from Quebec for a visitation in 1844, a feat so astounding that it became the subject of legend and stained glass. When Machray first made his way to Red River as bishop in 1865 it was by the American railway that had just been completed to Minnesota; there was still no route through Canada. If the CPR made Canada possible, it also made the Anglican Church of Canada possible. —Many other Canadian denominations had already “consolidated.” Canadian Anglicans hated to be the first denomination to try something new, but they also hated to be left far behind. —English mission societies were regularly threatening to withdraw support from Canada, and Bishop Machray envisioned a system whereby the wealthier dioceses of eastern Canada, their hard hearts melted by a warm feeling of fraternity with their western brothers and sisters, would support the missions of western Canada. A delegation from Rupert’s Land attended the provincial synod of Canada in 1886 to discuss the possibilities. —Excitement for foreign missions was sweeping the Protestant world at a fever pitch. The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Province of Canada was not up to the challenge; some thought that a national Church might create a more effective missionary society.

A conference to consider “consolidation” was requested by the provincial synod of Canada, and Machray responded by offering hospitality in Winnipeg. In 1890 representatives there considered a proposal for consolidation presented by Charles Jenkins, and with some revisions they adopted it as the “Winnipeg Scheme.”21 The chief bishop would become the primate, thus unseating the archbishop of Canterbury from the last formal vestige of his jurisdiction in Canada. The chief deliberative body would be called the General Synod. Its jurisdiction would include doctrine, worship, discipline, national agencies, missions, Christian education, theological education, relations among the dioceses, the boundaries of ecclesiastical provinces, and appeals from lower jurisdictions. Some of the sharpest debates as General Synod was being created surrounded the future role of the two ecclesiastical provinces. Rupert’s Land was determined to maintain its provincial identity and powers. It argued that regional

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questions about church governance structures were necessary in a country as large as Canada. The diocese of Montreal objected to maintaining provincial synods, and many easterners agreed. Rupert’s Land was unyielding. The east blinked. Delegates from the dioceses of the two ecclesiastical provinces, and from two of the three dioceses in British Columbia (which as yet had formed no province), met in Toronto in September 1893, declared themselves to be the General Synod of the Church of England in Canada, and produced three founding documents: a solemn declaration, a set of “Fundamental Principles,” and a “Basis of Constitution.” In effect, the provinces and dioceses were delegating to General Synod jurisdiction over specific matters. In a sermon, Machray summarized his view of the purpose of the new arrangement: “We are looking forward to a General Synod simply for united practical work through the systematizing, unifying and consolidating of the work of the Church in its various departments, for the provision of any necessary additional services so that there may be, if possible, a uniformity of use throughout the dominion, and for giving expression to the mind of the Church on social, moral and religious questions as may be needed.”22 The bishops announced the event to Canadian Anglicans through a pastoral letter (Document 25).

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The Final Shape of Anglican Governance With the creation of General Synod, the constitutional structure of the Church of England in Canada began to look the way it does today. It can be described generally, but allowances must always be made for local exceptions and variations. Those who worshipped at Anglican churches constituted the parish vestry (in some dioceses) or elected a smaller group that was also called a vestry (in others). Diocesan canons determined eligibility for voting and holding lay office. The parish vestry elected lay delegates to the diocesan synod. Diocesan synods brought together the lay delegates, the active clergy, and the bishop, generally once a year. Synods elected bishops, who kept office until resignation, retirement, or death. Bishops ordained clergy, in some dioceses entirely according to their own discretion, in others, especially after the bureaucratization of the 1960s, according to recommendations made by diocesan candidates committees. Diocesan synods elected both lay and clerical delegates to sessions of General Synod, which were held every two or three years at most. The lay and clerical delegates from dioceses across the country constituted the lower house of General Synod, the bishops the upper house. Until 1969 the houses met and voted separately; since then they have continued to vote separately but have met together, with notable improvement in dialog and interchange. The concurrence of both houses was required for every decision of General Synod, which appointed an executive committee and hired staff to administer its decisions between meetings. The House of Bishops elected the primate, until 1934 largely a titular head who chaired meetings. From 1934 to

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anglicans in canada 1967 he played an active role in administrative oversight, and since 1967 he has been the full-time chief executive officer of General Synod. In addition to the diocesan synods and the General Synod, there have been two, then three, and finally four provincial synods. Only the provincial synod of Rupert’s Land has much to do.

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Ambiguities in the Polity Period The creation of General Synod still did not settle the issues of ecclesiastical authority for the Anglican Church of Canada. Fortunately for debate-loving Anglicans, these are still in dispute. Three particular ambiguities in the structure of ecclesiastical authority have remained: the relative authority of General Synod and provincial synods, the relative authority of bishops and synods, and the authority of the Church as a whole to depart from the historic standards of Anglicanism. First, what could General Synod decide and what could the provincial synods decide? The issue was already joined in 1893. The Fundamental Principles of General Synod, in respect for the strong feelings of the Church leaders of Rupert’s Land, declared that its constitution “involves no change in the existing system of Provincial Synods.” The Basis of Constitution declared that “the jurisdiction of the General Synod shall not withdraw from a Provincial Synod the right of passing upon any subject falling within its jurisdiction at the time of the formation of the General Synod.”23 In other words, strangely enough, the creation of a synod of the national Church left the jurisdiction of the provincial synods unimpaired. The founding documents of General Synod were rearranged in 1931 into what was called the “Declaration of Principles.” An attempt to revise the Declaration of Principles in 1934 was referred to what proved to be an extremely lengthy process of discussion and negotiation. It finally returned to General Synod in 1952, which approved the revision subject to ratification by the provincial synods. That ratification was never completed. The sticking point was that the revision of 1952 attempted to impose limitations on the jurisdiction of provincial synods. In 1958 the provincial synod of Rupert’s Land took exception and reaffirmed that “the jurisdiction of the General Synod shall not withdraw from this Provincial Synod the right of passing on any subject within its jurisdiction at the time of the formation of the General Synod.”24 H. R. S. Ryan, a leading Anglican canon lawyer and long-time chancellor of the diocese of Ontario, analyzing the various texts and following the labyrinthine history that is but briefly summarized here, concluded in 1992 that the constitutional situation remained unclear.25 It has never been acknowledged that the decisions of General Synod preempt or exclude conflicting decisions by provincial synods. If a conflicting decision did occur, it is uncertain how it could be resolved. In the meantime, the Province of Rupert’s Land has continued to act according

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questions about church governance to its own constitution. Thus in 1975, when General Synod approved the ordination of women, no diocese in the Province of Rupert’s Land ordained any women before the provincial synod had pronounced itself in favor. Second, the respective jurisdiction of bishops and synods remained uncertain as well. Formally, the incorporated synod in each diocese usually owned the property, established the budget, passed canons, appointed officers and committees, received reports, and transacted most of the business. And the civil courts had decided that once they had spoken, their word was authoritative. But it was often up to bishops to interpret and implement their decisions, and bishops claimed considerable latitude in areas where synods had not claimed jurisdiction. In principle, the ambiguity of the situation was a check on either a dominating bishop or a dominating synod. In practice, however, synods were at a disadvantage, and only with strong and perseverant lay leaders and brave clergy could they hope to hold their own. Bishops were on-site all the time; synods were convened no more than once a year. Bishops were elected for life; lay delegates were elected anew for each synod. Bishops could use carrots and sticks and manipulative appeals to vows of obedience to win the support of clergy; synods could not. Moreover, high-church and tractarian Anglicans continued to affirm, as their spiritual forbears had done in the 1840s, that episcopal authority was more important than synodical authority. That view enjoyed a renewal in the wake of the centenary of tractarianism.26 Thus in 1948 a committee of the Lambeth Conference chaired by the archbishop of Quebec, Philip Carrington (1893–1965), clearly gave the bishop prominence over synods: “As in human families the father is the mediator of this divine authority, so in the family of the church is the bishop, the father-in-God, wielding his authority by virtue of his divine commission and in synodical association with his clergy and laity, and exercising it in humble submission, as himself under authority.”27 A third uncertainty in Anglican ecclesiastical authority in Canada has been the extent to which the Church is morally or legally free to depart from historic standards of Anglicanism. The question has inevitably been confused by the difficulty of defining what those standards were. In doctrine, were they to be identified with historic statements or with unwritten theological principles underlying the statements? In liturgy, were they texts and patterns of worship, or were they principles underlying the patterns of worship? In ethics, were they traditional standards of moral behavior, or were they ethical principles underlying the standards? And if the standards were the underlying principles rather than texts that could be read or practices that could be verified, how could people be brought to agree what the underlying principles ever had been in the first place? Could the Anglican Church of Canada, for example, revise the worship of the English prayer book? The matter was debated at every General Synod between 1902 and 1918, when it decided in the affirmative by approving a new prayer book. Could it approve worship not derived from the tradition of the prayer book? After the Book of Alternative Services was approved in 1985, the

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anglicans in canada Supreme Court of Appeal of the Anglican Church of Canada was asked to determine that ordinations conducted according to the new rite were valid. It decided, among other things, that as a voluntary association the Church’s rules were flexible and that, at any rate, no specific rule bound the Church to the precise words of the Book of Common Prayer.28 Was the authority to change worship infinitely elastic? Presumably not in principle but perhaps so in practice. Indeed, whenever the Church has done anything for the first time, the question has inevitably arisen as to its authority to do it.

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The Evolution of General Synod When General Synod was created it had no bureaucracy, no headquarters, and no executive officer other than the primate, who was a diocesan bishop with very little surplus time on his hands for being a primate. The total expenses of General Synod for the whole triennium from 1893 to 1895 came in under $1,500, almost all of it for assisting delegates with travel expenses and printing the minutes. But soon General Synod was busy creating specialized offices and committees. In 1902 it formed its denominational mission society, the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC), and hired an executive secretary for it. Before long the MSCC was appointing a general treasurer, editorial secretary, educational secretary, field secretaries, and other staff; within a few years it was assuming the administration of Indian residential schools. In 1908 General Synod created a Sunday School Commission, later the General Board of Religious Education (GBRE), and it appointed a permanent general secretary in 1910, followed by other administrators. In 1915 General Synod decided to organize a Council for Social Service (CSS), which received its own general secretary in 1918 and then a crew of assistants. With its increasing payroll, workload, and organizational complexity General Synod naturally needed an executive council, which it created in 1915. In 1918 it recognized a need for better funding and undertook a $3 million capital fundraising campaign, the Anglican Forward Movement, largely for the MSCC but also for many administrative purposes. A pension fund for national workers was established, and a canon on finance was enacted in 1921. The expanding national staff required permanent suitable office space. In 1922 the MSCC bought 604 Jarvis Street in Toronto; then, when it overflowed its space, it built annexes and purchased an additional property next door at 596 Jarvis Street. The MSCC leased space to the GBRE, the CSS, and an Anglican men’s organization. A fourth national board, Information and Stewardship, began operating provisionally in 1957 and was formally approved in 1959. More building projects were undertaken. Each of the four boards was ostensibly governed by committees appointed by General Synod, but the committees had too many members to exercise real oversight, and each board was really run by its general secretary. General secretaries were typically long-lived. The MSCC was run by Sydney Gould for twen-

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questions about church governance ty-eight years (1911–39) and by Leonard A. Dixon for twenty years after that. The CSS was run by C. W. Vernon for fifteen years (1919–34) and, after an interim, by William Wallace Judd for nineteen years (1936–55). Robert A. Hiltz ran the Sunday School Commission and its successor the GBRE for forty years (1910–50). If general secretaries stayed roughly within their budgets and kept the confidence of their committees—indeed, even if they failed to do so—they could rule their boards like independent fiefdoms. Their leadership was personal and in many cases larger than life. They wielded personal influence, developed networks of influence, and, if they felt like it, took initiative. The system worked sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Energetic, imaginative, and diligent general secretaries operating largely free of bureaucratic proceduralism could accomplish an impressive amount. Uninspired and territorial general secretaries could keep things stagnating indefinitely. The GBRE in particular, by the 1940s and 1950s, was an exercise in frustration. With these powerful fiefdoms under the charge of very long-lived general secretaries, General Synod, when it met, increasingly had little of substance to do other than approve decisions that the fiefdoms put forward. Initiatives from individual members of General Synod, if they survived the heavy hand of the agenda committee, were routinely referred to the boards and committees where the staff would have their way. By the late 1930s it was beginning to appear to many that the importance of General Synod in the life of the wider Church was waning and that its work was being manipulated by insiders. At the same time, its membership was increasing. In consequence, the quality of debate was deteriorating, and the potential influence of any one member who was not an insider was not great. Given that situation, fewer of the Church’s wisest and most seasoned members wanted to attend, and General Synod fell into a downward spiral of reduced expectations, reduced commitment, and reduced effectiveness. The polity model of Anglican governance was in decline. The process was paralleled in diocese after diocese. The only way to bring the various operations of General Synod under control, it seemed to many of those with influence, was to strengthen the hand of the primate. For its first forty years or so, from 1893 to 1934, this office was largely honorific, and usually only the most senior bishops—a euphemism for those who were the oldest and most tired—could expect to be elected. Robert Machray was sixty-two when he became primate, William Bennett Bond after him was eighty-nine, and Arthur Sweatman became the third primate at age sixty-two. Such influence as the primate enjoyed derived from his moral authority as the symbol of the Church’s unity and his ex officio membership on various committees. In the 1920s, however, as Philip Carrington observed in his history of the Anglican Church of Canada, “It was the era of ‘Big Business,’ and the idea in the inner circle at this time was that the Church ought to model its organisation on that of the business world. . . . Bishops should be chosen for their abilities as administrators, it was thought. The Primate should be the top executive

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anglicans in canada for the whole structure of boards and committees. These words are not a caricature; I had them direct from one of the leaders in the movement.”29 In 1934 a new canon on the primate gave him greater authority. The third historical model of Church governance was ready to take control.

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The Bureaucratic Model The term bureaucracy is used when an organization is run by those who hold office in it. Formally, a bureaucracy is subordinate to a governing group, such as a corporate board or legislature, which approves policies and budgets, but these are recommended and administered by the staff, who therefore exercise more power in fact than in theory. Characteristically, bureaucracies produce extensive regulations, forms, and procedures that are interpreted, usually in self-protective ways, by the bureaucrats themselves. In theory, bureaucrats work for and are accountable to executives such as government ministers, corporate officers, or bishops. In practice, executives depend on their bureaucrats and prefer to follow only those courses of action the bureaucrats have scrutinized and approved. The system can work well when the executives and their staffs support each other and share a common vision. The constant danger is that initiative and creative thinking will be stifled and that larger constituencies will be shut out. With the centralization and expansion of Church administration under a strong primate, the influence of models of “big business,” and the loss of confidence in General Synod, the time was ripe for a bureaucratic model of Anglican governance. World War II intervened in the 1940s, and progress in the 1950s was delayed by the postwar church boom and the longevity of the general secretaries of the MSCC, GBRE, and CSS beyond expectation. By the 1960s, however, many influential Anglicans were recommending changes in the systems of management. It is true that those who controlled the independent-minded fiefdoms resisted, but their days were numbered. The process by which modern management theory came to the Anglican Church of Canada in the 1960s is a case study in the denomination’s adaptation to modernity and is therefore reserved for chapter 5. It is enough to say that at the conclusion of the process came two reports from the management-consulting firm Price Waterhouse in 1967 and 1969. The recommendations made in these reports, supported by the primate, his executive committee, and most of his staff, were easily approved by a pliant General Synod. The four historic boards ceased operations, and most of their functions were brought under a single program committee that found itself so overloaded with agenda that it could do little but approve those staff proposals that had survived back-room bargaining and territorial in-fighting. Numerous other committees were downsized, amalgamated, or terminated, thus dramatically reducing the participation of ordinary Anglicans in Church affairs. The primate, who until 1967 had always been a diocesan bishop, became the full-time chief executive officer of

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questions about church governance the national Church and therefore an “insider” rather than an “outsider” in the bureaucracy. A general secretary was already chief operations officer. General Synod still met, of course, but the proposals it discussed were recommendations from committees written by or under the guidance of staff members. The appropriate symbolic date for the birth of the bureaucratic model of governance is 1967, the year of the first Price Waterhouse report, but the changes had long been gestating. By the early 1980s there were about 140 staff members at Church House. The new system was proving to be expensive. In the early 1990s the leaders of General Synod launched a thoroughgoing exercise in strategic planning. In 1994 the budget suffered major cuts, and about 10 percent of the staff was cashiered. It was not enough. In 1995 a new plan, “Preparing the Way,” was approved by General Synod. It narrowed the work of Church House to six “goal areas.” Other areas were downloaded to the ecclesiastical provinces, dioceses, and lower levels of the Church.

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The New Episcopacy During the days of imperial governance, the powers of bishops had been checked by the Crown, the imperial parliament, and the local legislatures. During the days of polity governance, the powers of bishops had been checked by synods. In bureaucratic governance, the powers of bishops were scarcely checked at all, at least not by mechanisms internal to Anglican Church governance. Now the restraints were external, primarily the civil courts and the limitations of the resources at the bishops’ command. If in the imperial model the bishop was the agent of the Crown, and if in the polity model the bishop was the president of an ecclesiastical commonwealth, in the bureaucratic model the bishop was the chief executive officer of a religious corporation. Synods resembled shareholders’ meetings more than parliaments. They were necessary formalities during which few cared to speak, fewer received a hearing, and very few indeed made a difference. The new situation was obvious to church members. Howard Clark, in his address to General Synod in 1969, acknowledged that “some of the most thoughtful and dedicated Churchmen” left General Synod “in a despondent frame of mind, with the thought, ‘What was the use of my going?’”30 A few days later, Bishop George Luxton of Huron was asking himself that very question when the Hendry Report (chapter 1) was being presented. As he described it later, the program committee had scheduled an hour for General Synod to hear some Indian music, a few speeches representing only one point of view, and some resolutions, but there was no time for serious discussion. A “negative voice,” he said, “would have looked like a vote against motherhood and for sin.”31 If synods had lost their power, it would be an act of honesty to revise the constitutions and canons of the dioceses accordingly. An early and elegant step in

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anglicans in canada that direction was Canon 22 of the diocese of Toronto, passed by its synod in 1976 over the short-lived dissent of an ineffective minority. It was drafted by William Hemmerick (1928–2001), a lawyer who served as the chancellor of the diocese. Hemmerick dreamed of a diocesan operation as sleek and efficient as a junior oil-drilling company. It would have a strong-willed, clear-sighted CEO, compliant department heads and site managers, and trouble-free annual meetings. The chief obstacle to realizing this dream was the aging structure of a constitutional episcopacy. Thus the existing provision for clerical discipline, Canon 8, protected the authority of the diocesan synod and the rights of clergy in accordance with the received model. It allowed a priest to disobey the bishop except in matters “in which the Bishop is legally or canonically entitled to obedience.” How could Synod be divested of powers it had held so long by statute, canon, and custom? Hemmerick’s solution was to repeal Canon 8 and create Canon 22. This began with a preamble claiming that bishops of Toronto had “always had jurisdiction in respect of all ecclesiastical causes within his Diocese,” a historical fiction calculated to repress the painful memories of the Synod Act of 1856.32 Then Canon 22 took the synod’s powers and gave them to the bishop in the form of a signed blank check. The bishop was authorized to fire any church worker guilty of “contumacy,” which was now defined as any directive the bishop might be pleased to issue in respect of diocesan or parish affairs. Hemmerick had achieved the ecclesiastical equivalent of repealing the Magna Carta. He had vaporized all the checks on episcopal authority that Victorian Anglicans had constructed. Three examples illustrate the CEO style of episcopacy in a bureaucratic model of Church governance and the dwindling relevance of synods. After World War II, the Anglican Church and the United Church of Canada began discussions with a view to Church union. General Synod had overwhelmingly approved the general principles of union in 1965 and had commended a specific plan of union for study in 1973. In 1975 the bishops, meeting by themselves before General Synod, seized the initiative. No resolution had come before them for their concurrence or nonconcurrence. They simply decided to issue a “statement of counsel”: They would veto the plan of union if it came to them (Document 26). As the Canadian Churchman reported in March 1975, “Members of NEC [the National Executive Council] reacted angrily to the statement. . . . ‘We might as well go home,’ said [one member].”33 It was the end of the plan of union and the end of formal discussions between the United and Anglican Churches until 2003. The preemptive episcopal veto meant that deliberations of General Synod were for the most part (a few legal necessities excepted) purely at the pleasure of the bishops, who were free to make decisions for the Church without listening to what the lower clergy and laity had to say. It is true that when Michael Peers became primate he asked the House of Bishops not to debate the business of General Synod beforehand, and he made sure that the agenda committee of the House respected this principle

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questions about church governance when it planned topics for discussion.34 The initiative ended the bishops’ preemptive veto for the time being and encouraged them to listen to others before making up their collegial mind on issues. But it could not by itself restore real authority to General Synod. About the same time as the failure of union discussions with the United Church, Anglicans were entering a period of serious controversy about the ordination of openly gay and lesbian persons and the blessing of same-sex unions (chapter 6). What is significant for the purposes of this discussion is that the decisions that were or were not made were the fruits of episcopal discussion without synodical consultation. The decision to keep issues of sexuality off the legislative agenda of synods was apparently decided by the House of Bishops in 1976 in the deluded hope of preserving Church unity in the face of potentially explosive controversy. For the next twenty-five years the bishops continued to hold discussions around these issues in private. In 1976 they commissioned a task force on sexuality, with James Reed of Trinity College as chair. When the resulting 120-page report, presented in 1978, failed to please them, however, they suppressed it. They issued pastoral statements in 1978 and 1979, pretending to represent their unanimous opinion (chapter 6). They also commissioned a second research report, once again with James Reed as chair. This second report they did release in 1985, but only after they and the National Executive Council had weighed every phrase and eliminated all potential offense. In 1992 General Synod was allowed to hold a “forum” on the topic, but on the express condition that nothing was to be decided. The next General Synod, in 1995, passed a few resolutions essentially endorsing the bishops’ statements of 1978 and 1979 as well as a further resolution politely inquiring whether the bishops were giving any consideration to updating their views. In 1997 the House of Bishops responded with a new statement on the Church and homosexuality; the 1998 General Synod received it and commended it. The 2001 General Synod held another forum on homosexuality. Thus was unity maintained, if unity be understood as the bishops understood it. They also kept issues of sexuality off the business agenda of their diocesan synods. Only the bishop of New Westminster broke rank, and that was not until 1998. The contrasts with the Canada provincial synod of 1869 are striking. There, too, faced with a highly divisive issue, the bishops tried to maintain unity by suppressing synodical discussion. But in the polity period, the lower clergy and lay delegates firmly asserted their rights under the constitution of synod, and the bishops were compelled to capitulate. In the 1980s and 1990s, by contrast, the lower house, faced with the most high-profile issue of the day, deferred to the request of the bishops to do nothing. Synods were no longer meaningful instruments of governance. A final example comes from the diocese of Toronto in 1992. James Ferry, a gay priest, had been forced by circumstances to out himself to the bishop, Ter-

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anglicans in canada ence Finlay, in the summer of 1991.35 He acknowledged that his partner lived with him in the rectory. Because no synod had ever been permitted to legislate on the matter, there was no positive Church law defining with whom a priest might live or prohibiting the involvement of priests in homosexual relationships. The House of Bishops had indeed made its brief pronouncements on homosexuality in 1978 and 1979, but they were subject to multiple interpretations, and in any event they had no canonical authority because canons required the action of General Synod. But Finlay had no need of a synodical resolution on homosexuality; he had Canon 22 in his pocket. According to evidence given later, he ordered Ferry to withdraw from his relationship, and Ferry refused. Finlay then charged Ferry with contumacy. A bishop’s court was convened in February 1992, heard witnesses, and found Ferry guilty. Finlay stripped him of his license to officiate as a priest, and Ferry was unemployable in the Anglican Church of Canada. Again, the contrast with a parallel case in the polity period is striking. In 1874 the rector of the Cathedral in Toronto, Henry Grasett (1808–82), and several others of lesser eminence established a mission fund for evangelical clergy and students in competition with the diocesan mission fund, which, they said, was controlled by persons hostile to evangelicals. The bishop told them to stop. They defiantly continued. The bishop thereupon had Grasett prosecuted in a diocesan court for depraving the discipline of the Church. An uproar ensued. The laity loudly declared that it was a breach of the privileges of Synod for a bishop to penalize a cleric for doing something Synod had not prohibited. The bishop was presented with a petition bearing signatures of two thousand Anglicans, many of them prominent in business, government, and the professions. Disciplinary standards for clergy, the laity declared, belonged by law to Synod rather than the bishop alone. The words of the law lords of the Privy Council in Long v. Gray, eleven years earlier in 1863 (Document 23), were fresh: “The oath of canonical obedience does not mean that the clergyman will obey all the commands of the Bishop against which there is no law, but that he will obey all such commands as the Bishop by law is authorised to impose.” But little memory remained of a constitutional episcopacy and synodical governance in the diocese of Toronto in 1992. The bishop could exercise coercive authority over the private lives of his clergy in matters about which neither civil nor ecclesiastical law had anything specific to say.

Conclusion Since the days of the Apostles, churches have organized themselves according to models of governance and management they found in the surrounding culture. The Anglican Church of Canada successively adopted three cultural models. In the colonial period it was organized around the royal prerogative, from which, according to the Tory view, Church authority flowed. Then, about the time when the Canadian provinces were winning self-government through their

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questions about church governance legislatures, the Church moved toward self-government through its diocesan synods. By the 1930s this model was showing serious inadequacies in practice. Finally, in the 1960s, when corporations and government exercised authority primarily through CEOs and bureaucracies, power in the Anglican Church of Canada settled in the bishops and their assistants and advisers. Each model has had advocates and detractors. Most systems work well for some leaders and poorly for others. The imperial Church worked poorly for Jacob Mountain, first bishop of Quebec, who disliked frontier life, squabbled with governors and other officials, and lacked powers of persuasion with his English superiors. But it worked very nicely for John Strachan, first bishop of Toronto, who had friends in high places, political canniness, and immense energy and imagination, and knew how to charm fellow Anglicans and fight with non-Anglicans. The polity Church worked well for Robert Machray, its first primate, who masterfully played to an influential laity by winning their confidence, speaking plainly, and rebounding from frustrations. He also knew how to neutralize his episcopal rivals. But the polity Church in Canada, like the Roman republic that was its model, had a way of giving power to the most conservative, wealthy, and traditional class, and progress was often obstructed, as Howard Clark saw in 1931. The bureaucratic Church worked well for skilled bishops operating on a common wave length with skilled staffs, especially if the bishops also built rapport with their wider constituencies. It worked poorly for bishops who failed to cultivate their staffs, lost touch with their clergy and people, lacked political savvy, or failed to maneuver lightly around the relics of ecclesiastical constitutionalism, notably synods. Each model of governance had its own set of financial restraints. An imperial model worked best when money flowed from the Empire. The polity model was necessary, as Thomas Fuller and John Strachan argued, when the Church depended on its own resources. The bureaucratic model, which effectively disenfranchised from diocesan governance most of those on whom the system financially depended, had in this respect a less happy record. Its shortcomings, however, were partly compensated by the experience of close fellowship that many Anglicans had in their parishes and that opened their pocketbooks. In each period some Anglicans have liked the dominant model of governance, and some have not. They have debated governance in substantially consistent categories, including the jurisdiction and function of Church councils and officials; the proper influence of the wider Anglican Communion; the appropriate relative roles of bishops, lower clergy, and laypeople; the authority of Scripture; tradition and various forms of law; and models of governance. The most conspicuous constant of all is that, in every age and in every system of governance, those Canadian Anglicans have been happiest who have been most comfortable with a certain detachment between theory and practice and a large element of ambiguity.

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Notes 1. 24 Henry VIII c. 12. 2. On the development of Canadian Anglican synods, see H. R. S. Ryan, “Aspects of Constitutional History: The General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 34 (1992): 1–146 (hereafter JCCHS); T. R. Millman, “Beginnings of the Synodical Movement. . . ,” JCCHS 21 (1979): 3–19; Bentley G. Hicks, “Synodical Government within Canadian Anglicanism,” JCCHS 33 (1991): 123–40; Henry Lowther Clarke, Constitutional Church Government in the Dominions beyond the Seas and in Other Parts of the Anglican Communion (Toronto: Macmillan, 1924); and R. V. [Reginald Vanderbilt] Harris, An Historical Introduction to the Study of the Canon Law of the Anglican Church of Canada (Toronto: Commission on Canon Law, General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, 1965). 3. Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966– ), 11: 326–28 (hereafter DCB). 4. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Peter L. Phillips Simpson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), IV; William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London: printed for R. Faulder, 1785), 6: 7; John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America (Philadelphia: printed for Hall and Sellers; J. Cruikshank; and Young and M’Culloch, 1787), letter 20. 5. Biographies can be found in DCB, alphabetically and by volume according to the year of the subject’s death. 6. Millman, “Beginnings,” 5. 7. John Strachan, A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Toronto: At the Primary Visitation Held in the Cathedral Church of St. James, Toronto, on the 9th September 1841 (Toronto H. and W. Rowsell, 1842), 33, available as Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 21840 (hereafter CIHM). 8. Ross Border, Church and State in Australia, 1788–1872: A Constitutional Study of the Church of England in Australia (London: SPCK, 1962). 9. [United Church of England and Ireland, Diocese of Toronto], Triennial Visitation of the Lord Bishop of Toronto, and Proceedings of the Church Synod of the Diocese of Toronto, October 12 and 13, 1853, Originally Reported and Compiled for “The Church” Newspaper (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1853), 7. 10. A. N. Bethune, Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, D.D., LL.D., First Bishop of Toronto (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1870), 275. 11. The name Ontario was to be given six years later to the whole civil province, which had been called “Upper Canada” from 1791 to 1841 and “Canada West” from 1841 to 1867. Thus the Anglican diocese of Ontario is only a small part of the civil Province of Ontario. 12. For Glen v. Johnson, see By Grace Co-Workers: Building the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 1780–1989, ed. Alan L. Hayes (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1989), 55–56; and, for both cases, Ryan, Aspects of Constitutional History, 50. 13. D. C. Masters, “The First Provincial Synod in Canada,” JCCHS 4, no. 4 (1962): 1–18. 14. Lord Blachford, Some Account of the Legal Development of the Colonial Episcopate, available as CIHM no. 06511. 15. Charles Gray, The Life of Robert Gray, Bishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of Africa, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons, 1876).

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questions about church governance 16. Gray, The LIfe of Robert Gray, 2: 584. 17. Peter Bingham Hinchliff, John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964). 18. General Synod Journal (1969): 21 (hereafter GSJ). 19. [Robert Machray, nephew of Archbishop Machray], The Life of Robert Machray, Archibishop of Rupert’s Land, Primate of All Canada, Prelate of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (Toronto: Macmillan, 1909); DCB 13: 642–46. 20. United Church of England and Ireland, The Debates on Ritualism in the Provincial Synod of England and Ireland: Held at Montreal September 9th and the Following Nine Days, 1868 (Montreal: John Lovell, 1868), available as CIHM no. 06427. 21. Thomas Charles Boucher Boon, The Winnipeg Conference of 1890, occasional publication 4 (Toronto: Canadian Church Historical Society, 1960). 22. GSJ (1893): 65. 23. Ibid., 60–61, frequently republished in editions of Anglican canons, General Synod handbooks, and General Synod journals. 24. Ryan, “Aspects of Constitutional History,” 71. 25. Ibid., 69–71. 26. A good example is Kenneth Kirk et al., eds., The Apostolic Ministry: Essays on the History and the Doctrine of Episcopacy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1946). 27. Lambeth Conference Report 1948 (London: SPCK, 1948), 81–94, at 85. 28. Ryan, Aspects of Constitutional History, 101–4. 29. Philip Carrington, The Anglican Church in Canada: A History (Toronto: Collins, 1963), 262–63. 30. GSJ (1969): 20. 31. Huron Synod Journal (1970): 95. 32. Canon 22 was first published in the Toronto Synod Journal (1976): 265–71, 280. It has been reprinted in compilations of diocesan canons and clergy handbooks. 33. Carolyn Purden, “Union Negotiations Halted,” Canadian Churchman 101 (March 1975): 8. 34. Michael Peers, “Colonial Anglicanism: Imperial to Episcopal,” presented at “(Re)Making Anglican Tradition(s),” Trinity and Wycliffe Colleges, Toronto, June 25, 2001. 35. In addition to contemporary reports in both the church and daily press, see James Ferry, In the Courts of the Lord: A Gay Priest’s Story (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1993), and John Fraser, Eminent Canadians: Candid Tales of Then and Now (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2000).

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chapter 4

Questions about Anglican Church Style Until the 1960s, Canadian Anglicans reserved their most impassioned theological disputes for ecclesiology, that is, the theology of the Church and its relation to Anglican life, doctrine, discipline, and worship. Even those not given to impassioned disputes recognized the point of asking what it meant to be the Church and, more specifically, what constituted the acceptable understandings and styles of Anglican worship and discipline. Anglicans found themselves deeply divided about these things. But they also took a certain pride and pleasure in their theological contests and developed a sense of denominational identity from them.

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High Church and Low Church During the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth Anglicans would have called the topic under discussion “churchmanship.” It is impossible to redeem that term from its gender-exclusive form, and I shall use the term church style, but “churchmanship” served wonderfully well in its day, for it evoked just the right connotations. For one thing, the term churchman by itself was very commonly used when we would say “Anglican.” Questions of “churchmanship” were questions about how to be loyal to the Anglican Church. The term was also hyphenated to distinguish “high-church” Anglicans from “low-church” Anglicans. When those terms came into use toward the end of the seventeenth century, high-church Anglicans were Tories who believed that authority flowed from the top down, and low-church Anglicans were Whigs who were inclined to trace authority from the bottom up. Accordingly, high-church Anglicans thought Christ had given his authority to his apostles, who in turn had given it to their successors the bishops, who exercised it on Christ’s behalf over the Church. Lowchurch Anglicans thought Christ had given his authority to the Church as the “blessed company of all faithful people.” High-church Anglicans stressed the

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questions about anglican church style authority of the clergy; low-church Anglicans stressed the priesthood of all believers, which meant that every Christian could and did meet the living God without priestly mediation. High-church Anglicans thought an established Church led by bishops was an indispensable part of the English constitution; low-church Anglicans thought the state should equally accept non-Anglican Protestants. High-church Anglicans thought that the orders of the bishop, presbyter (or priest), and deacon, a tradition of worship, and other foundations of Church life had originated with Christ and should be honored by all obedient Christians. Low-church Anglicans thought God had given the Church freedom to provide from time to time for its own organization, according to its specific historical situation. From these two positions grew different understandings of worship, sacraments, mission, ecumenism, and the Christian life. Each side appealed to the Bible as the source of its views. Distinguishing high church from low church is relatively clear, perhaps deceptively so, but after the Oxford University tractarians exploded onto the stage in 1833 the landscape became more untidy. On many points tractarians generally agreed with the high church, from which they (doubtfully) claimed continuity. They agreed that the office of bishop was instituted by Christ and bore his authority; that the sacraments were, by God’s promise, assured instruments of grace; that the Church should honor tradition; and that ancient spiritual and liturgical disciplines helped Christians grow in holiness. In other respects they differed. High-church Anglicans of the old school identified themselves as Protestant and despised Rome; tractarians did not. The old high church treasured Church establishment; tractarians did not. The old high church held a view of the Eucharist rooted in the sixteenth-century reformers Thomas Cranmer and John Calvin; tractarians did not. The old high church was inclined to a rational and moralizing spirituality (many called it the “high-and-dry church”); tractarians were rather inclined to a mystical and poetic spirituality. The old high church was Tory; tractarians looked Tory at first, but after being roundly attacked by most of the English Tory press and most Tory politicians they found the Liberal party a little more attractive. W. E. Gladstone (1809–98), a tractarian and four times the prime minister of Britain, moved from Tory to Liberal for just that reason. A confusion in nomenclature resulted. Tractarians were high church but not in the old way. By the 1860s, when Anglicans used the term high church they had to specify whether they meant “old high church” or “tractarian.” A further terminological confusion was that from the 1860s Anglicans who once had been called “low church”—people with extremely flexible ideas on doctrine, worship, and Church order—came to be called “broad church.” The term low church was now sometimes used to mean evangelicals or “serious” Christians, people whose ideas on doctrine and worship were for the most part anything but flexible. The connection was that evangelicals did share the flexible views of the old low church in respect of Church order. But they took a much

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anglicans in canada higher view of the authority of Scripture as revelation, stressed orthodoxy in a propositional sense, and believed that adult renewal and individual experience of assurance of new birth in Christ were norms in the life of faith. Arthur Sweatman (1834–1909), the third bishop of Toronto, testified to the confusion between the terms evangelical and low church. He told his first synod that he was an evangelical in the sense that it was his aim “to know nothing in my preaching but Jesus Christ and Him Crucified, to set forth sacraments, ordinances, creeds and ceremonies, not in the place of the Gospel, but as a means to bring men nearer to Christ and Christ nearer to men.” But he would “resent it as opprobrious to be stigmatized as a Low Churchman,” because he wanted to conserve apostolic order as bequeathed by the Reformation.1 Canadian Anglicans came to identify two major parties among themselves, which they called the “Church party” and the “evangelical party.” The Church party included the old high church and the tractarians. The evangelical party included the old low church and the evangelicals. Each party had its own recognized leaders, organizations, controversialists, networks, newspapers, mission societies, hymn books, and Sunday school curricula. In synods, in the Church press, and wherever else possible, the two parties attacked each other with an energy, and frequently with a scurrility, that is now surprising and even shocking. Of course, there had to be more than two positions. There were various ways for people to qualify statements or meet differences of opinion. Some were stalwart and militant for their view, whereas others were flexible and conciliatory. Some adopted positions from both parties. For example, James Carmichael, who was briefly before his death the fourth bishop of Montreal, confused many by combining an ultra-evangelical proclamation of Christ with “the most extreme claims for the authority of the Church as the general Christian conscience” so that bewildered laypeople commented on hearing “the highest of High Church sermons from the lowest of Low Church bishops.”2 For these and other reasons, party labels can easily mislead. But historians use them because they were used at the time, and Anglicans between about 1840 and 1900 generally sensed that these two polar positions determined both the dynamic of Anglican controversy and the landscape of Anglican life. Masses of church-going Anglicans at the time disliked the partisanship and avoided identifying with either group. John Cragg Farthing (1861–1947), who became bishop of Montreal, recalled in his memoirs that as rector of Woodstock, Ontario, in the 1890s he urged the congregation from the pulpit “not to take either of the church papers published in Toronto, as I wanted them to remain Christian and love all fellow churchmen as brethren.”3 Archibald Fleming, archdeacon of the Arctic in 1927, was perplexed with “churchmanship” in his fundraising in England. His diocese was evangelical and supported by evangelical mission societies such as the Colonial and Continental Church Society (Col. & Con.), but his speaking engagements in England were scheduled by the highchurch Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). He was distressed to

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questions about anglican church style discover that seeking the support of one party might jeopardize the support of the other. “At first I was confused and often upset,” he recalled, and he tried to steer “a middle course.” But he was also relieved to discover “a vast number of sensible people who, while supporting one or another of the parties, abhor party politics and respect those with whom they differ.”4

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Irish Anglicans in BNA Between the American Revolution and Confederation, BNA received perhaps 1.75 million Irish immigrants, of whom about two-thirds were Protestant. Even after one allows for those who did not remain in Canada, those who were not Anglican, and those who did not go to church, it remains that Church of Ireland Anglicanism was numerically influential in the Church of England in BNA. In particular, it reinforced polarization of the Anglican parties and raised the temperature of their debates. It did so in three ways. First, the most high-profile evangelical Anglican leaders in Canada in the years before and after Confederation—men such as Benjamin Cronyn and Maurice Baldwin in western Ontario, Samuel Blake in Toronto, James Carmichael in Montreal, and Robert Fitzgerald Uniacke (1797–1870) of St. George’s, Halifax—were very often of Irish birth or heritage. So were many of their followers. Second, because many leaders of the Church party were clergy who had been trained in English colleges and had learned along the way to look down on the Irish, questions of Church style were often intermixed with national animosities. Third, many Church of Ireland immigrants to BNA brought with them what I have called the “Irish model” of Anglicanism, shaped by years of nasty quarreling about the rights of Irish Roman Catholics and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. They were persuaded that the Church must be pure and uncompromised in its doctrine and that it must therefore exercise vigilance against changing fashion, attractive error, and worldly accommodation. Irish Anglicans in Canada were inclined to interpret theological diversity as irrefutable evidence that someone was in error. Unfortunately, when they sniffed out the error they often found it in the doctrines that high-church English clergy venerated as classical Anglican ecclesiology. John Strachan found most Irish clergy so “unguarded in their statements” that he was “really afraid to allow them to preach for they seem never to have known the distinctive principles of the Church of England or to have thrown them away on the voyage.”5 It was poor timing that Irish immigration to BNA reached its peak just as early tractarians were seeking to “recover” the catholic character of Anglicanism. Antagonism to Roman Catholics was characteristic of most Anglicans, but for Church of Ireland Anglicans it was fundamental to their religious identity. “Popery” stood for persecution, superstition, priestly autocracy, idolatrous sacramental practices, and deviant views on the Blessed Virgin Mary. Accordingly, they viewed the tractarian project of recovering catholicism as a campaign to

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anglicans in canada transform a British, Protestant, scriptural Church into a foreign, superstitious, medieval sect. When in the 1840s some tractarians, notably their most powerful spokesperson, John Henry Newman, actually “defected” to Rome, Irish Canadian Anglicans redoubled their vigilance and sharpened their rhetoric.

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Early Controversies over Church Style An early quarrel about Church style developed in 1824 at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Halifax. During the late 1810s and early 1820s, in the wake of a religious revival to which a few Anglicans had succumbed, an evangelical contingent became active at St. Paul’s, where the assistant curate was evangelical as well. They began to meet in one another’s homes for informal devotions and Bible studies, which was most unusual for Anglicans. Then the rector, the Rev. John Inglis, son of the first bishop, was appointed bishop himself. Who should be the new rector? The congregation asked for the appointment of their assistant curate. The new bishop had a more high-church candidate in view, one with greater respect for the sober standards of Anglican order. The congregation claimed the right of naming their new rector on the authority of an act of the Assembly of 1759. The government argued that the act did not apply when the rectory was vacant in the very special case that its incumbent had been made a bishop. In this case, it said, the Crown had the right to appoint the new rector. A fierce legal battle ensued, pitting the evangelical cause of the rights of the laity against the highchurch cause of the authority of the bishop. The modern historian of St. Paul’s, R. V. Harris, one of Canada’s preeminent Anglican canon lawyers, believed that the congregation could have won, based on a later (1857) decision in a similar case in England. But the congregation could not afford to pursue a case against the Crown and withdrew from the field. Most parish leaders of St. Paul’s left the Anglican Church and eventually formed Granville Street Baptist Church, which would later play a key role in beginning Horton Academy and Acadia University. Indeed, the controversy at St. Paul’s Church is usually considered as opening a significant new chapter for Baptist influence in the Maritimes and sometimes as closing a chapter on Anglican influence. As it happens, the government’s appointee at St. Paul’s proved very capable and served as rector for forty years.6 In 1836, when the high-church archdeacon of New Brunswick and the highchurch bishop of Nova Scotia formed the first colonial Church Society, the suspicions of evangelicals were raised. J. W. D. Gray (1797–1868), an evangelical who spent most of his life in ministry at Trinity Church, Saint John (1826–67), distrusted the archdeacon’s high-church apologetics for the new venture as well as the veto power of the bishop over all decisions.7 Accordingly, his church, by far the wealthiest in New Brunswick, decided to hold aloof from the Church Society, seriously impairing its success. Later, when the Crown separated New Brunswick from the diocese of Nova Scotia, calling it the diocese of Frederic-

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questions about anglican church style ton, the new bishop, John Medley, succeeded in coaxing Trinity into the Church Society. Nevertheless, Medley’s own commitment to the organization has been questioned, for, as a tractarian, he apparently distrusted the strong lay influence. In Upper Canada there appeared in 1837 the first number of a newspaper called The Church, edited at first by Alexander N. Bethune (1800–1879), rector of Cobourg and a favorite of John Strachan’s. When in 1839 Upper Canada became, for Anglican purposes, the diocese of Toronto, The Church functioned as the diocesan house organ. Its principles were distinctly high church, reflecting Strachan’s and Bethune’s positions. Its particular mission was to remind readers that episcopacy was an essential feature of the Church. Christ had kept his promise to be with the Eleven to the end of the world by giving authority to their successors, the bishops. “In this sense the Apostles are still alive and represented by those on whom they laid their hands. . . . Of this successive transmission from generation to generation every link is known from St. Peter to the present Bishop.” It argued that Christian communions without bishops were not a pure part of the Catholic Church and that therefore ministers of other denominations had a lower status than laypeople of the Church of England. The Church condemned any Anglican who dared “to be present at any schismatical place of worship” or who joined in interdenominational groups such as the Bible Society. Beginning in 1839, The Church from time to time reprinted a tract of the Oxford movement or a sermon by a tractarian leader such as John Henry Newman or E. B. Pusey.8 Evangelical Anglicans, and not only they, were annoyed that the bishop was promoting his own personal church style so aggressively. In 1843 an Anglican minister in Upper Canada wrote privately to a friend in England, “There is a large party of the most influential clergymen strongly opposed to the principles advocated by the paper [The Church]—some have already refused to take it and unless a great change is soon made a considerable number of us will enter a protest, and this will be the more awkward to do as the Bishop is a personal friend of the Editor and holds the same views.” Two months later, a regional quarterly meeting of Anglican clergy passed a resolution condemning “the Oxford principles of the Church newspaper.” Protests from others apparently followed, to judge from Strachan’s letters. The editor from 1841 to 1843 resigned because “the excitement . . . amidst the clash and din of party strife, was too much for him.”9

Church Style and Baptismal Theology Anglicans in BNA followed the theological contests of the mother country like sporting fans at an athletic event, and in the late 1840s they were much absorbed in the dramatic stand-off between an evangelical English priest named George Cornelius Gorham and the high-church bishop of Exeter. The issue in dispute was whether baptism actually conferred redeeming grace on people or wheth-

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anglicans in canada er it was a sign, a hopeful sign but not an assured sign, of God’s favor. The Book of Common Prayer implied that infants were truly made “regenerate” through baptism; they were, that is, born again. Evangelicals subjected this liturgical text to scrupulous interpretation and concluded that infants must grow to an age of discretion and consciously receive Christ and declare faith in order for the grace signified in baptism to become fully operative. When in 1847 Gorham acknowledged that he held this evangelical view of baptism, his bishop refused to induct him into a parish to which he had been appointed.10 The Church party applauded, and then, when Gorham sued, the evangelical party cheered. The case raised questions about the nature of a sacrament, the role of personal faith, the nature of liturgy, authority in the Church, and many other issues. The case went to the highest court in the Empire, which found for Gorham on a technicality. All around the Anglican world, not least in BNA, the decision raised a storm, partly because the law lords had accepted jurisdiction over definitions of doctrine and partly because they had reached a divisive decision. An Anglican’s response to the Gorham case was a litmus test for his or her Church style.

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Church Style and the Synods In the 1850s, Anglicans were beginning to debate the Church constitution in ways parallel to more recent debates in civil society about the colonial constitution (chapter 3). The high church thought it best for Church affairs to be directed mainly by bishops, just as Tories thought it best for government to be managed by appointed governors and executive councils, unfettered, so far as possible, by elected assemblies and populist agitation. On the other side, the low church wanted bishops to be subject to representative institutions just as colonial reformers preferred the executive arm of the state to be accountable to legislatures. In civil society, the way forward was through ideological realignment, which was accomplished in different ways in different places in the 1840s. In the Canadas, moderate Tories—“progressive conservatives,” they came to be called— separated themselves from high Tories and made common cause with the reformers. In Nova Scotia, by contrast, Baptist liberals around 1843 joined and realigned the Tories. Such realignments made “responsible government” politically possible. Executive councils disappeared, and governments came to be appointed by the legislatures. In the Anglican Church, the way forward was through compromise. In designing their synods, Anglicans included both high-church elements and lowchurch elements. Lay delegates, elected by their parish, could participate in the government of the diocese, which pleased the low church, but clergy held permanent seats and bishops held the power of veto, which pleased the high church. Bishops were elected by the synods, which pleased the low church, but they were not accountable to their synods for their exercise of executive authority, which

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questions about anglican church style pleased the high church. Many evangelicals, especially in the dioceses of Nova Scotia, Fredericton, Quebec, and British Columbia, at first opposed this compromise and protested against the whole synodical system (chapter 3). But they were out-voted and finally had to acquiesce. Thus, in the history of Canada, ultra-Tories lost. In the history of Canadian Anglicanism, however, conservative traditionalists preserved a place in a compromise. Comprehending all factions was the instinct of Canadian Anglicanism. This reflected a commendable charity and also perpetuated quarreling. Once synods were created, high-church and low-church Anglicans disagreed about their jurisdictions. High-church Anglicans wanted synodical jurisdiction restricted to “temporal” matters such as budgets and buildings and the advocacy of civil legislation; bishops should retain authority over “spiritual” matters such as doctrine and worship. Low-church Anglicans took the opposite view. Disputes resulted. Were temporal affairs really separable from spiritual affairs? How could you tell which was which? Surely questions about how the Church should be managed had to be connected to questions of Christian doctrine, mission, and devotion? How could synods make responsible financial decisions if they could not demand a financial accounting from the bishop? Could the laity raise money, support ministries, and even run theological schools without the permission of the bishop? Should parish clergy be chosen by the bishops or by the parishes? Thus in large measure questions about Church style in Canadian Anglicanism centered on the rights of the laity, just as questions about “responsible government” in Canadian constitutional history centered on the rights of British subjects. In both realms, the historical trend in the nineteenth century proved to be toward wider enfranchisement and the protection of the rights of the people. Jurisdiction in matters of doctrine and worship was so far as possible withheld from early diocesan synods in the 1850s but freely and explicitly given to the national General Synod in 1893.

Ritualism In the 1860s there emerged in Canada the most contentious issue of all: ritual. It was a powerful visible symbol of underlying ecclesiological differences.11 The ritualistic controversies in Canada, like most things Anglican, were imported from England. During a debate in the provincial synod of Canada on ritualism Thomas Brock Fuller (chapter 3) noted the derivative character of the local conversation: “Are we not closely and intimately connected with England, where this evil is very prevalent? . . . To England chiefly we are indebted for our literature. From England we obtain almost all our Church tracts.”12 Until the 1840s, a low-church service of worship and a high-church service of worship appeared the same.13 Even the early tractarians, although they wanted a dignified manner of worship, had no interest in innovating with clerical vest-

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anglicans in canada ments, church furniture, or ceremony. The tractarian leader E. B. Pusey, from whom the group was often called “puseyites,” always conducted services wearing a cassock, surplice, and black scarf such as any evangelical Anglican minister would have chosen. But by the 1840s a few tractarians, and many who were not tractarians and some who despised the tractarians, were advocating medieval clerical dress, medieval church ornamentation, medieval ceremonial, medieval hymnody, and medieval, neo-gothic church architecture as ways of giving liturgical expression to the authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the mystery of worship. This movement was called by some the “Cambridge movement” and soon, more commonly, “ritualism.” Most Anglicans at first were horrified at these anti-Protestant, catholicizing novelties. Although originally distinct and mutually critical, the Oxford and Cambridge movements converged over the course of time so that by the twentieth century a characteristic mark of anglo-catholicism was high ritual. One of the earliest ritual disputes was whether the minister should wear a surplice in the pulpit. The surplice was standard liturgical wear for the officiant in Anglican worship, but by custom, before climbing into the pulpit to preach, he was supposed to doff the white surplice and don a black preaching gown to show that he was moving from the office of liturgical leadership to the office of preaching the Word. Ritualists, by contrast, were beginning to teach the novelty that clergy should continue to wear a surplice when they were preaching, to show that preaching was part of liturgy. Evangelicals countered that subsuming preaching under liturgy demoted preaching and destroyed the proper distinction and balance between Word and prayer or Word and sacrament. Others cared little for the theological subtleties of the matter but knew they disliked change. In 1845 the curate of a parish in the English diocese of Exeter, after wearing his surplice in the pulpit, was mobbed by a crowd of two thousand and required police protection. Perhaps the first Canadian to preach in a surplice was Archdeacon George Coster, who is said to have introduced the practice in Fredericton before 1845. About the same time, Bishop John Strachan instructed the clergy at St. James’s and St. George’s Churches, Toronto, to preach in their surplices but met resistance. In Halifax, evangelical St. Paul’s Cathedral had a running battle over the issue with tractarian Bishop Herbert Binney (1818–87) after his arrival in 1851.14 Finally, in 1864, frustrated with the congregation’s intransigence in the matter, Binney moved his cathedral to the new St. Luke’s Church. Two years later the bishop demanded and received the resignation of the minister at an inner-city mission in Halifax for persisting in preaching in a gown. The question of the surplice was tame in comparison to the ritual innovations that followed. In 1859 a priest in the diocese of London began wearing a chasuble at the Eucharist and chanting the words of the eucharistic prayer. A chasuble on a priest was a sign that he interpreted the Eucharist as a propitiatory sacrifice, in derogation of the sufficiency of “Christ’s one oblation of him-

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questions about anglican church style self once offered” as the Book of Common Prayer phrased it. Fifty uniformed police were required every Sunday to keep order at the services and, a few months later, seventy-three police. In the following years Canadians read about “advanced” clergy in England who introduced altar candles, surpliced choirs, processions, altar vestments, the mixing of water with wine, the reserved sacrament, incense, and other controversial practices. They read poisonous English tracts and newspaper commentaries and followed stories in the English press of agitated mobs, ecclesiastical commissions and royal commissions, parliamentary committees, legislative bills, the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, the prosecutions and occasional imprisonments of ritualistic clergy, and the humiliation in 1890 of the profoundly devout bishop of Lincoln, who had used the sign of the cross at the absolution and blessing during a parish worship service and stood condemned in the court of the archbishop of Canterbury. Canadian Anglicans paid close attention to the English ritual innovations. Some admired the innovators. Others admired the purists. The conflicts were therefore quickly imported into Canada. The innovators introduced the practice of turning east at the creed before 1849. Holy Trinity Church, Toronto, began weekly celebrations of Holy Communion at Easter 1858. St. John the Evangelist, Montreal, began daily celebrations at Advent 1868, and the presiding priest wore a chasuble. The purists were outraged. Choristers at the Anglican cathedral in Quebec, where choirs had been wearing surplices since the early 1800s, were chagrined to discover that they had been ritualists without knowing it, and they determined to wear the surplices no longer. Evangelicals wanted synods to legislate against ritual innovations and irregularities; high-church Anglicans preferred to leave such matters to the authority of the bishop. In 1868 the provincial synod of Canada—with representation from the dioceses of Quebec, Montreal, Ontario, Toronto, and Huron—received a small mountain of memorials against ritual, one of them bearing four hundred signatures and three of them from diocesan synods, including Toronto (Document 27). After a breathtaking ten days of strenuous debate, several motions and amendments, and three formal conferences between the lower house (clergy and lay delegates) and the upper house (bishops), the provincial synod passed a resolution restricting liturgical innovation (Document 28). Among the scores or hundreds of serious parish ritualist controversies in Canadian Anglicanism between 1865 and 1900, the only one to lead to lasting schism involved the Very Reverend Edward Cridge (1817–1913), the rector and dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria. This Cambridge evangelical was not happy with the drift in his diocese toward tractarianism and ritualism. In 1872, during the service of consecration of a new Christ Church Cathedral building, the archdeacon of Vancouver preached a sermon with ritualistic overtones, and Cridge stood up then and there and registered a public protest. Afterward, Bishop George Hills, a tractarian, wrote the dean a formal letter of censure, thus

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:52:06.

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anglicans in canada setting off an exchange of correspondence that became public. The bishop deposed Cridge from his parish for violating Canon 53 of the Canons of the Church of England of 1603, Cridge sued, and the court upheld Hills. Two years later, Cridge and most of his congregation, including the Hudson’s Bay governor, joined the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC), a recently formed offshoot of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Two years after that, Cridge was made an REC bishop. The REC still exists. Because every ritualist innovation produced an attack of vapors in the evangelical party, a historian might infer from the intense debate and publicity that ritualism gathered rapid momentum in Canada. That is very unlikely, although no one has done the detailed, parish-by-parish research that would be necessary to know how rapidly liturgical practices did change. In England it is estimated that 30 percent of the parish clergy was sympathetic to high-church practices by 1901, but only 2 percent was definitely ritualistic as indicated by, say, the occasional use of incense in worship.15 On the whole, Canadians were probably more conservative than the English. Simple ceremonial was likely the norm in the overwhelming majority of Canadian churches until the liturgical movement became well established in Canada during the 1960s. The piece of ceremonial once considered high-church that caught on most successfully was the “eastward” position, meaning that at the Eucharist the priest turned his back to the congregation during the prayer of consecration. But that practice has been infrequent since the 1970s.

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Church Style and Anglican Journalism Throughout the nineteenth century, the two major Anglican parties in Canada used the Church press to propagate their views.16 The Church of Toronto continued to publish until 1856. In 1853 evangelical Anglicans in the diocese began to publish their own newspaper, the Echo and Protestant Episcopal Recorder, which was moved to Montreal about 1860 and disappeared in 1863. One of the causes it championed was the similarity in essentials between the Church of England and the other churches of the Reformation. Its writers affirmed that neither Scripture nor experience nor the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England suggested that the Holy Spirit withheld grace from Presbyterians or Methodists for ordained ministry. The two newspapers habitually attacked each other, and assaults became increasingly personal. Until the 1870s, the most prominent party newspaper was the Church Witness, edited by J. W. D. Gray of Saint John, which during its run from 1850 to 1868 ferreted out all manner of “Popery and Puseyism.” After 1870 the two most important Anglican newspapers were both based in Toronto. The Dominion Churchman, founded in 1875 by a crusty, high-church English bookkeeper named Frank Wootten, originally functioned as the organ of the Church party, although it professed to be nonaligned. In 1890 its name was changed to Cana-

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questions about anglican church style dian Churchman, and although Wootten continued as proprietor, William Clarke, a Trinity College professor, became editor. On Wootten’s death in 1912 the newspaper was sold, and it presently came into the hands of a holding company controlled by evangelicals. In 1948 the holding company agreed to give its management to the General Board of Religious Education (GBRE). In 1959 the newspaper achieved independence under a board of trustees elected by General Synod, and it continues under the name Anglican Journal. The second major Anglican party newspaper of the late nineteenth century was the Evangelical Churchman, which was founded in 1876. As its name suggests, it was the organ of the evangelical party. For most of its life it was edited by J. P. Sheraton, the principal of Wycliffe College. When it closed in 1900 the Canadian Churchman ran an editorial headlined “The Survival of the Fittest!”

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Cathedrals and Church Style During the 1840s two tractarian bishops were appointed in BNA, Edward Feild (1801–76) of Newfoundland and John Medley (1804–92) of Fredericton.17 A revival of gothic architecture was just then flourishing in their native England, and their first thought was to build cathedrals. There were as yet no Anglican cathedrals either in the British colonies or the United States. Nor were evangelicals, whether Anglican or non-Anglican, pleased with the prospect of having one. Cathedrals, they thought, symbolized an effete and corrupt medieval understanding of church and faith and episcopacy and liturgy. At a grand event in Fredericton in 1845, when the lieutenant governor of New Brunswick (in military uniform) laid the foundation stone of the new cathedral in the presence of numerous provincial dignitaries, Medley had an excellent public opportunity to explain his purposes (Document 29). Borrowing from themes that he had discussed in an article of 1841, Medley, arguing from Exodus, said that God took meticulous interest in the detail of religious architecture and that a correct physical environment for worship heightened spiritual perception.18 Medley’s success in completing Christ Church Cathedral in 1853, despite the opposition of the critics, is a tribute to his determination. Feild used the consecration of his cathedral in 1850 to demonstrate his catholic commitments. The raised altar with lighted candles, the chanting of the prayer of consecration, and his sermon, which denounced the Privy Council’s decision in the Gorham case, all appalled the evangelical press. In general, in diocese after diocese high-church Anglicans promoted cathedrals, and evangelicals resisted them. Robert Machray, the second bishop of Rupert’s Land and a certified evangelical, however, took great pride in creating what he called a “real cathedral” in Winnipeg in 1874, with dean and chapter, glebe, and incorporation under provincial law. He considered a cathedral to be a great instrument of Christian mission. Evangelicals proved to be much more sympathetic to cathedrals when they were championed by other evangelicals.

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Other Issues The Church party and the evangelical party also argued over other issues.

Offertory A regular Sunday morning offering of money for the support of the Church was introduced in the 1840s, and the Oxford English Dictionary credits John Medley with being the first to call it an “offertory” (1852). Evangelicals resisted it as a tractarian innovation.

Episcopal Elections Before 1857 the Crown appointed Canadian bishops, and Anglicans had no choice but to receive the ones who were sent them. When bishops came to be elected by synods, the electoral process could generate ferocious party politics. The first episcopal election, held by the diocese of Toronto for the first bishop of Huron in 1857, was preceded by three years of raw public campaigning. Before the election of the first bishop of Ontario in 1860, evangelicals in Kingston tried to have the appointment remitted to the Crown; they had more confidence in the evangelical archbishop of Canterbury than in the high-church clergy of Toronto. In 1879 an episcopal election in Toronto was stalemated for twentythree ballots over a period of five days. The stalemate was broken only when a conference of the two parties met privately to identify a compromise candidate.

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Ecumenical Relations Evangelicalism was the characteristic form of late-Victorian Protestantism in Canada. As a result, denominational boundaries separating mainline Protestants were relative things for Anglican evangelicals. They supported interdenominational groups such as the Bible Society, Tract Society, the Lord’s Day Alliance, temperance societies, and the YMCA; promoted provincial primary and secondary education, even at the expense of Anglican schools; and favored interdenominational higher education. They also usually approved the use of the clergy reserves by non-Anglicans. The case was far otherwise for high-church Anglicans, some of whom preferred not to fraternize with Protestants, even in death. In 1846, for example, a tractarian priest in Maramichi, New Brunswick, refused to bury a child who had been baptized by a Presbyterian. Consecrated ground should not receive the remains of non-Christians. In 1850 in what is now Ontario, the University Act secularized King’s College, an Anglican establishment, and used the endowment to create the ecumenical University of Toronto. The act had been proposed and steered through the legislature by Robert Baldwin, an evangelical Anglican and the early theoretician of “responsible government.” Peter Boyle de Blaquiere, the first chancel-

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questions about anglican church style lor of the University of Toronto, was another evangelical Anglican and an early proponent of synods (chapter 3). Strachan and his friends were absolutely flabbergasted that fellow Anglicans could be so traitorous, and mutual recriminations were published in the Church and secular press for years. Strachan traveled to England and raised funds for a new Anglican university, Trinity College. Evangelical Anglicans said that if Strachan was acting on behalf of the Church, they did not recall being consulted.19 In 1851 A. N. Bethune—former editor of The Church and later (1867) the second bishop of Toronto—preached at the laying of the foundation stone of Trinity. Choosing as his text Romans 14:23, “Whatsoever is not of faith, is of sin,” he gave memorable expression to the high-church view of the University of Toronto: “We object further to a system which would recognize the lawfulness of religious division, and strike at the foundation of the unity of the Church, in countenancing an assemblage of sects and parties, with an equality of claim and pretension, around what we are constrained to term a gorgeous temple of infidelity.”20

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Patronage Before the colonial Church moved to self-government, the provincial governor appointed the rectors of major churches, and the SPG or other English mission societies appointed or at least strongly influenced the appointment of most of the ministers of mission churches. By the 1850s, patronage was passing to the colonial Church itself. At this point Anglicans began disputing who should have authority to exercise that patronage. The Church party strongly preferred the appointment to rest with the bishop, whereas the evangelical party strongly preferred it to rest with the parish. As dioceses began establishing synods, each synod had to face this controversial matter, and some dioceses required years to resolve it. Conflicts exploded between bishops and parishes, with the hapless clergy sometimes squirming uncomfortably in the middle. An early and important example was Bishop John Travers Lewis’s decision in 1862 to appoint a high-church rector and dean at low-church St. George’s Cathedral, Kingston, entirely without consultation with the laity, who fiercely protested their rights in two successive synods and in the press. The dean was forced to resign in 1864, and in 1870 Lewis moved out of his home in the unpleasant atmosphere of Kingston and headed for Ottawa.21

Accountability Evangelicals wanted diocesan officials to be accountable to synods, and diocesan financial affairs to be fully disclosed; the Church party thought that such proposals infringed on episcopal prerogative. The first two bishops of Toronto successfully protected the diocesan chancellor from giving an accounting of the clergy commutation funds from which he seems to have freely borrowed for

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anglicans in canada speculative purposes (with disastrous consequences).22 In 1879 the synod of the diocese of Ontario disputed the bishop’s authority to dispose of a bequest to the diocese. The bishop retorted that he would do what he pleased with the bequest, even if opposed by “all of the lawyers in Christendom.” In 1878 and 1879 he also prevented the clerical secretary from informing the synod about what proved to be a $14,000 shortfall in diocesan funds.

Hymnals The first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern appeared in England in 1861 and reflected tractarianism and the tastes of the ritual school. Anglican evangelicals had classically limited their singing to the Psalms, but at mid-century they were publishing a number of hymnals of their own, such as Bishop Bickersteth’s Psalms and Hymns (1858), later renamed the Hymnal Companion (1870). Which hymnal a Canadian parish used was therefore a statement of its Church style. An early project of General Synod was to publish a hymnal that had selections from both parties. The result, the Book of Common Praise (1908), owed much to the energies of James Edmund Jones, a Toronto lawyer.23

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Theological Education Quite frequently, quarrels about Church style focused on the training of clergy. Because colonial Anglicans took the view that a diocese should have only one school for that purpose, it was virtually inevitable that in diocese after diocese the Church style of that one school became a cause of conflict. Episcopal authority was implicated as well because each bishop felt the right to mold the school according to his own predilections. The exception in this respect was Fredericton, where the evangelically minded principal of King’s College was solidly entrenched before Bishop John Medley came on the scene. Those who disliked the Church style of the bishop’s school frequently began a rival institution in a neighboring diocese or even in the same one. Because Bishop’s University, Lennoxville (1845), in the diocese of Quebec was run by a tractarian from Oriel College, Oxford, the bishop of Montreal founded Montreal Diocesan College (1873), which was run by evangelicals. In reaction to highchurch Trinity College, Toronto (1852), the bishop of Huron founded evangelical Huron College (1863). Also in reaction to Trinity College, a well-organized group of the lay elite of the diocese of Toronto founded Wycliffe College (1877). In reaction to plans for what looked likely to be a high-church seminary at Vancouver, to be called St. Mark’s College, which was slow getting off the ground (1912), evangelical clergy, with the support of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Col. & Con., founded evangelical Latimer College (1910). In Nova Scotia, Bishop Hibbert Binney ensured that King’s would be a vehicle of tractarianism. Because most wealthy Nova Scotia Anglicans were evangelical, however, they refused to support it, and from 1884 to 1923 “it stumbled from one

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questions about anglican church style crisis to another.”24 In 1920 the diocesan synod of Nova Scotia tried to stem the flow of red ink by promising to include evangelicals at King’s, but the diocesan synod of Fredericton thwarted that action. King’s survived financially by arranging an association with Dalhousie University in 1923, a move that allowed it to continue to exclude Anglican evangelicals.

Missions Before the 1890s, many evangelicals thought that the Church’s missionary work was being controlled by high-church Anglicans who appointed the wrong sort of people to domestic missions and dragged their feet on foreign missions. In Toronto in 1874, evangelicals organized their own independent mission board, an act the bishop and the Church party regarded as bordering on schism (chapter 3). The Church party was similarly aggrieved when in 1888 Wycliffe alumni funded their own missionary to Japan and when in 1894 evangelicals created a private missionary society (chapter 1), efforts that seemed sure to undermine officially sponsored mission work. One result of the conflict was that party strife was exported to the Anglican mission field in Japan (chapter 1).

Doctrine The two parties took every opportunity to dispute contentious matters of doctrine, such as the nature and mission of the Church, the authority of bishops, and sacramental grace. Hundreds of books and pamphlets and thousands of newspaper articles and letters to the editor survive as evidence.

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Various Liturgical Practices As John Cragg Farthing summarized the matter of liturgical practice, “If a clergyman took the ‘north-end’ at the Celebration of the Holy Communion he was a ‘Low Churchman’; if he took the eastward position he was a ‘High Churchman.’ If he spoke of the ‘Altar’ he was ‘High’; if he spoke of the ‘Table,’ or the ‘Holy Table,’ he was ‘Low.’ If he wore colored stoles he was very ‘High’; if he wore a black scarf or stole he was ‘Low.’ If he had a cross on the Altar, he was decidedly ‘High’; if a cross was on the hangings, the book markers, or the stole, he was ‘High.’”25

General Synod If many evangelicals in the 1850s were suspicious of the advent of diocesan synods, many high-church Anglicans in the 1890s were suspicious of proposals for a General Synod. Here was a plan for a constitutional and representative body which might sometimes trump the diocesan bishops. Moreover, in 1893 it looked as if General Synod would give the evangelicals the national balance of power, since evangelical dioceses out-numbered high-church dioceses. All of Rupert’s

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anglicans in canada Land, except for Qu’Appelle, was evangelical, and so were Montreal and Huron; Toronto had a largely evangelical laity and bishop although a largely highchurch clergy. High-church bishops such as George Hills of British Columbia and John Travers Lewis of Ontario were therefore slow to endorse proposals for a General Synod. Lewis complained to a friend in 1891 that a General Synod would mean “handing over of the Management of the Church of England in Canada to the Low Church management for a generation. There is not a High Church Diocese west of Kingston—and some eastward are shaky. I desire therefore for matters to remain in status quo till God gives us a deliverance.”26

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Trinity, Huron, and Wycliffe Colleges Perhaps the best-known battle in the Canadian wars over Church style was the attack on high-church teaching at Trinity College, Toronto, launched by Benjamin Cronyn (1802–71), the first bishop of Huron.27 Trinity had opened in 1852 with support from the Church party but not from the evangelical party, which had joined with other Protestants in creating the provincial University of Toronto. The high-church provost of Trinity, George Whitaker (1811–44), was also its only theological professor.28 He gave long, dry lectures and required students on their examinations to return his precise thoughts, using his precise language. As a result, students took very careful notes, as verbatim as possible. In course of time senior students began to sell their notes to junior students. These student notes, being in question-and-answer form to help students prepare for examinations, were dubbed the “Provost’s Catechism,” although they were not strictly written by the provost. A copy of the document came into Cronyn’s hands. A brilliant and fiery Irish evangelical, Cronyn had taken his B.A. from Trinity College, Dublin, and his M.A. from Cambridge University, where he had been Divinity Prizeman in his year. He had gone to Upper Canada in 1832 and been appointed to St. Paul’s, London, by the diocesan bishop, the bishop of Quebec. He had been elected the first bishop of Huron in 1857 over A. N. Bethune. As a bishop of the province, Cronyn served ex officio on the board of Trinity College. In April 1860 Cronyn mentioned to the Trinity College bursar that he was dissatisfied with the theological teaching at the school. His unhappiness became known, and an exchange of letters ensued with John Strachan. The matter subsequently came up in the synods of Huron (July 1860), Toronto (June 1861), and Ontario (April 1862). Resolutions of confidence in Trinity were proposed at the diocesan synods. After robust debate and with considerable division, these were voted down in Huron and passed in Toronto and Ontario. The dispute was also processed in the corporation of Trinity College, which in the course of several meetings considered a pastoral letter by Cronyn (July 1860) and a long answer from Whitaker. Cronyn then produced the final form of his objections to Whitaker’s teaching (Document 30).

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questions about anglican church style In November 1861 the corporation of Trinity College submitted the documentation to the five bishops of the Province of Canada for their consideration. In the summer of 1863 the corporation learned that the bishops supported Whitaker four to one—two supported him firmly, two supported him generally, and Cronyn himself was the lone dissenter. On September 29, 1865, on the motion of A. N. Bethune, the corporation passed a resolution that Whitaker’s teaching was “not unsound, unscriptural, contrary to the doctrines of the Church of England, dangerous in its tendency, nor leading to the Church of Rome.” That was the good news for Whitaker; the bad news was that the vote was divided thirteen to eight. Cronyn, in the meantime, had created a new theological college, which he called Huron College, in his diocese. It became the founding school of the University of Western Ontario. Balancing the evangelical criticism of Trinity College in Document 30, Document 31 presents the high-church criticism of its younger rival, Wycliffe College. It includes a statement by John Travers Lewis (1825–89), elected in 1860 to be the first bishop of Ontario. Lewis, a gold medalist in theology at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1847, came to Canada as an SPG missionary in 1848 in the wake of the Irish famine. He was the parish priest of Brockville when the episcopal election was called for the new diocese of Ontario. His chief advantages in the election appear to have been that he was relatively unknown and that many evangelicals assumed that an Irish Anglican graduate of “T.C.D.” would be a safe choice. But the tall, formal, scholarly Lewis was both high-church and inflexible, showing that evangelicals had no exclusive claim on the “Irish model” of an uncompromising doctrinal conviction. During the Trinity College controversy Lewis told his synod that Cronyn’s charges against its teaching were “ostensibly on the ground of its having a tendency towards Rome, but really because it has not a tendency towards Geneva.” In 1874, when Lewis discovered that an Anglican civil servant in Ottawa was supporting the Reformed Episcopal Church, he excommunicated him.29 Throughout his episcopate he loyally supported Trinity College and refused to ordain graduates from its evangelical rival, Wycliffe College. In 1895 the parish priest of St. George’s, Ottawa, J. M. Snowdon, a Trinity College graduate but an evangelical, commended to Lewis a young parishioner named Gibson as a prospective minister. There were two difficulties. First, Gibson lacked sufficient educational credentials. That could be finessed. Second, Snowdon thought that he should go to Wycliffe. That, to Lewis’s mind, was impossible. He said that Gibson could go to Trinity or to Bishop’s in Lennoxville. A brief exchange of correspondence followed, and then the frustrated Snowdon decided to call a meeting of his sympathizers for March 2 to consider forming an association and “to protest the exclusion of earnest, godly young men from the work of the ministry, simply because they choose to attend an Evangelical College,” as his advertisement in the press put it.30 Perhaps Ottawa evangelicals were also hoping to develop some muscle for

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anglicans in canada an upcoming episcopal election, because the diocese of Ontario was about to spin off a new diocese of Ottawa. In any event, the protest meeting was held, and some of the bishop’s supporters came to the meeting as well, seeking to defend him. The dispute became a cause célèbre. About the Ottawa meeting the Evangelical Churchman commented, “The conflict lies between the majority of the laity on one side, who, to use the Bishop of Toronto’s words, are staunchly and zealously Protestant, and, on the other side, a very large majority of the clergy who have ceased to be in sympathy with the principles of the Reformation.” The Dominion Churchman commented that Wycliffe College “exists for the purpose of creating and perpetuating disunion and uncharitableness among Churchmen.”31

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Decline of the Low Church and High Church While issues of Church style continued to provoke quarrels among Anglicans, factionalism and bitterness declined in the early twentieth century for several reasons. First, Church leaders wanted it to decline and looked for ways to overcome divisions. Before 1920 they merged as many institutions of the rival parties as they could: newspapers, mission societies, hymnals, and Sunday school curricula. Second, larger issues emerged, such as World War I, which showed the pettiness of squabbles about colored stoles. Third, Church life was generally less important in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth, and Canadians found many things to argue about other than religion. Fourth, women’s and young people’s associations, organized around fellowship and service instead of Church politics and theology, modeled a more irenic form of Anglicanism that in time influenced male adults beneficially. A fifth and final reason for the decline is that Anglican theological options and interests were diversifying, and the new variety overflowed the two old parties. Diversification was forced in part by modernity, which split conservative Anglican catholics from liberal Anglican catholics and conservative evangelicals from liberal evangelicals (chapter 5). It also reflected the increased openness of some Anglicans to such styles of Christianity outside the Victorian Protestant mainstream as Roman Catholicism, the holiness movement, and Pentecostalism. As a result, Canadian Anglicanism moved from ideological polarization to a multiplicity of special interest groups that had overlapping memberships and shifting alliances. There were no clear victors in the polarized period of quarreling about Church style, but no clear losers either. Ritualists by the end of the nineteenth century could be happy that they had won greater tolerance for ceremonial practice, tractarians could be happy that the establishmentarian ideal was in decline, and evangelicals could be happy that the rights of the laity and the place of interdenominational cooperation were acknowledged. Anglicans continued to discuss the underlying questions of the identity of the Church and the proper norms of worship, ministry, and Church life.

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Twentieth-century Church Styles The very diverse Anglican groupings that in the twentieth century replaced the two venerable Victorian Church parties resembled them in some ways. Each began with an interpretation of the Gospel that lay the foundation for a program of witness, spirituality, and action. Each had its own organizational structures, theological commitments, agenda, networks, sources of benefaction, publications, forms of advocacy, and, in many cases, preferred styles of liturgical expression. And each sometimes left the impression that those who had other priorities may have missed the point of true Christian faith.32

Conservative Anglican Catholic Organizations Conservative Anglican catholic organizations preserved much of the theology, liturgical taste, agenda, suspicion of modernity, and love of dispute that had characterized the Victorian Church party. Very much unlike the Church party, however, it was open to alliance with conservative evangelicals. Its chief centers came to be King’s College, Halifax, and St. Peter’s Cathedral, Charlottetown. Since 1980 personnel from the two centers have edited a haughty-toned newspaper, the Anglican Free Press, published books with the imprint “St. Peter’s Publications,” held an annual theological conference, and run a youth ministry.

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Liberal Anglican Catholics Liberal Anglican catholics were an adaptation of catholic Christianity to the perspectives and teachings of modernity and will therefore be discussed more fully in chapter 5. This school of thought had won a firm foothold by the 1930s, and by the mid-1960s it was the most influential group in Canadian Anglicanism. Compared with conservative catholics, liberal catholics were more likely to recommend the periodic updating of the Church’s liturgical and doctrinal formulations. Like conservatives, they valued tradition, but, unlike them, they preferred to picture tradition as dynamic and evolving rather than as something handed down and received. From the 1920s to the 1970s they had a strong intellectual center at Trinity College, Toronto, where a brilliant faculty included Eugene Fairweather (1920–2002) and D. R. G. Owen (1914–97). One of several organizations with liberal catholic interests was called “Affirming Catholicism” which became active in the 1990s. Annual alumni meetings at Trinity College usually featured liberal catholic speakers as well.

The Liturgical Movement The liturgical movement began among Roman Catholic Benedictines and took root ecumenically during the 1920s. It influenced liturgical reform and change in many denominations, including the Anglican Church of Canada, between the

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anglicans in canada 1950s and the 1980s. As a movement for what Roman Catholics came to call aggiornamento (the updating of the Church and its traditions), it will be discussed more fully under the theme of modernity in chapter 5. Because of its interdisciplinary, theologically integrated teaching, its international and ecumenical networks, its effective instruments of advocacy, and its utter confidence in the truth and importance of its message, the liturgical movement was able to set the agenda for Anglican discussions of Church style for half a century. It helped break down some of the animosities between liberal catholics and evangelicals by appealing to both groups. Liberal catholics liked its stress on community worship and its project of identifying, appropriating, and updating authentic Christian tradition. Many evangelicals liked its stress on scriptural preaching and its invitation to the “whole people of God,” laity no less than clergy, to participate fully in fellowship and worship. The principal and lasting contribution of the liturgical movement, then, may have been to give the coup de grâce to the ghosts of Victorian Anglican partisanship. But in their stead it created controversies of its own. One Anglican exponent of the liturgical movement, Associated Parishes, was founded in the Episcopal Church in the United States in 1946 and quickly spread to Canada. A strictly Canadian organization called the Hoskin Group was founded in 1990. “Hoskin” was the name of the Toronto street separating liberal catholic Trinity College from Protestant-minded Wycliffe College, and it was chosen to signify that interest in liturgical reform transcended theological schools of thought. The group, now Liturgy Canada, claims three hundred members and publishes a periodical. By far the most influential instrument of the liturgical movement in Canadian Anglicanism, however, was the Doctrine and Worship Committee of General Synod, which between 1969 and 1985 produced several liturgies for trial use, culminating in the Book of Alternative Services. The General Synod authorized that set of texts for Sunday worship and other occasions as an option to the 1962 Canadian edition of the Book of Common Prayer.

The Prayer Book Society of Canada The society was founded in 1985 in the wake of the publication of the new Book of Alternative Services and evolved as a national organization as well as regional chapters. It describes itself as “committed to the full doctrinal and devotional standard of classical Anglican Christianity, as embodied in the Canadian Book of Common Prayer or BCP (1962).”33 Its various groupings hold numerous conferences and events and publish various newsletters. The Prayer Book Society also publishes the more academic Machray Review.

Social Activists Several organizations have sought to remind Canadian Anglicans of the social implications of the Gospel and to encourage progressive or radical social reform

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questions about anglican church style and reconstruction on Christian principles. In the Church of England, William Temple (1881–1944) gave considerable leadership in what was sometimes called Christian socialism or, with a different connotation, Christian sociology. In 1941, as archbishop of Canterbury, Temple convened a conference at Malvern, a spa resort in Worcestershire. The conference issued widely publicized “findings” that challenged capitalism on Christian grounds and urged radical economic reform. Malvern inspired a young professor at Trinity, Charles Feilding, to begin publishing a newsletter, Canada and Christendom. In Montreal a group of progressive clergy formed the Anglican Fellowship for Social Action (AFSA) by 1944, a movement that spread to southern Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Jersey. It published the Anglican Outlook from 1945 to 1960, when the periodical came under ecumenical sponsorship with the name Christian Outlook. The AFSA’s energy in advocating unpopular causes in Nova Scotia led the diocesan synod to adopt a rule in 1948 requiring motions on social issues to be referred to a reliable committee for sanitization.34 It was an important landmark in the decline of the importance of synods (chapter 3). During the Red Scare of the 1950s the group was often suspected of being communist.

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Evangelical Groups The Victorian “evangelical party” split into two streams. Conservative evangelicalism, which resisted modernity, sunk into dispirited obscurantism during the 1920s. Liberal evangelicalism, which adapted to modernity, was the most characteristic form of Canadian Anglicanism from about the 1920s to the 1950s but then declined, in part because its individualistic spirituality offered little reason, once Christendom declined, for going to church. It may still be the intuitive Christianity of those millions who tell pollsters that they believe in Jesus Christ but steer clear of organized religion. The final demise of liberal evangelicalism can be dated to 1967, when its last important remaining exponent, the “evangelical group movement,” ceased operations. A revival of Anglican evangelicalism began in the early 1960s. The Evangelical Fellowship of the Anglican Communion (EFAC) was founded in England in 1961 by John Stott (b. 1921), an evangelical pastor, writer, and teacher who served as its general secretary for twenty years. It represented a Protestant and Reformed approach to Anglicanism. In 1967 Stott and his more conservative friend and rival James I. Packer (b. 1926) organized a conference at the University of Keele, England, which attracted a thousand people and is frequently seen as restoring evangelicalism to a significant mainstream position within Anglicanism. Both Stott and Packer directed much of their attention to Canada; the latter, in fact, took up a teaching position at Regent College, Vancouver. In the mid-1980s a handful of Anglican evangelicals from across Canada met at Wycliffe College in Toronto to organize a Canadian affiliate of EFAC. The group now calls itself Barnabas Anglican Ministries and publishes a periodical, InCourage.

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Anglican Fellowship of Prayer In 1953 Samuel Shoemaker, a new rector of an Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, began several prayer groups, and his wife, Helen, led schools of prayer. The prayer groups became a movement, and the movement spread to other dioceses. The members of the prayer groups began coming together for conferences, at first in Pittsburgh and then elsewhere. Out of these conferences, the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer (AFP) was formed in 1960. A retired bishop of Toronto, Frederick Wilkinson, was keynote speaker at an international conference in 1962. A Toronto chapter was in place by 1968, and AFP chapters are now in place in most Canadian Anglican dioceses. The Canadian AFP publishes a newsletter, Anglican Fellowship of Prayer Canada.

Healing The Order of St. Luke was founded in 1932 by John Gayner Banks, rector of an Episcopal Church in San Diego, and his wife, Ethel Tulloch Banks. Its principal objective is to “promote the restoration of the apostolic practice of preaching as taught and practiced by Jesus Christ.”35

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Renewal Pentecostal Christianity, originating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taught that Christian believers could experience a special blessing, often called the “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” by which they were empowered with perceptible and remarkable spiritual gifts and experienced the release of joy in praising God. In the late 1940s Pentecostal preachers and healers began reaching out to members of mainline denominations. In 1959 a number of Episcopalians in three communities in southern California received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, directly or indirectly, through the ministry of friendly Pentecostals. The clumsy disciplinary action of the Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles led to articles in Time and Newsweek, and the publicity helped the cause. Canadian Anglicans quickly became involved. In 1961 several clergy in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, were baptized in the spirit and under southern California influence, and in 1962 praise meetings began at St. Elizabeth’s, Etobicoke, Ontario. By the mid-1970s charismatic renewal was reckoned a respectable Church style in Canadian Anglicanism. Its credibility was assisted by the outbreak of charismatic Christianity within the American Roman Catholic Church in 1967 and the positive response of many Roman Catholic bishops and theologians. Missionary-minded Anglican charismatic parishes in Seattle, Oxford, Houston, and Darien, Connecticut, became influential centers of the movement. In several Anglican provinces, charismatic Christians began organizations known as Anglican (or Episcopal) Renewal Ministries. The Canadian ARM, formed in

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questions about anglican church style Oshawa in 1983, organized a conference in Ottawa in 1985 that attracted 1,100 persons. In 1986 it launched a quarterly magazine, Tongues of Fire, now called Anglicans for Renewal. It was later particularly influenced by the “Toronto blessing,” which began in 1994 at a Vineyard church near the Toronto airport, when worshipers cried, laughed, jumped, sang, made animal noises, saw visions, and exhibited other unusual behaviors in the Holy Spirit.36 Since then, about three hundred thousand persons from all over the world are reported to have visited this church.

“Orthodox Doctrine” Through the collaboration of Barnabas Ministries, Anglican Renewal Ministries, and the Prayer Book Society, a conference called “Essentials” was held in Montreal in 1994. It was much influenced by James Packer. The Montreal conference issued a doctrinal statement composed of several brief creedal affirmations and a long paragraph concerning human sexuality. Essentials took on a life of its own and established a continuing governing council. It describes its mission as “calling the Anglican Church of Canada to embrace and live by its orthodox Christian heritage under the renewing guidance of the Holy Spirit.”37 Its incorporation of conservative evangelical, conservative catholic, and charismatic elements exemplifies the contemporary fluidity of Anglican alliances in issues of Church style.

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Feminism In the 1970s many began to ask whether received Anglican ecclesiology and patterns of worship reflected and reinforced a patriarchy incompatible with the proclamation of Galatians 3:28 that “in Christ there is neither male nor female.” Gender-exclusive language in the Book of Common Prayer, exclusively male hierarchies of clergy (which gave visible expression to ecclesiastical sexism when they marshaled themselves in liturgical processions), and male language for God were critiqued. Perhaps, too, some thought, there existed distinctly feminine styles of community and spirituality that Anglican tradition had failed to honor. I shall return to issues of gender in chapter 6. Although Canadian Anglicanism has certainly been influenced by feminism, it has produced few feminist theologians and few effective feminist organizations. Of the first eighteen women ordained to the priesthood in Canada, only one considered herself a feminist. Moreover, a 2002 study suggests that most Anglican women leaders are content with traditional ecclesiological models.38 But in 1998 General Synod approved, for three years, an “inclusive” eucharistic prayer, and feminist liturgies have been created for numerous specific occasions.

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Comprehending the Diversity There were two general approaches (with many variations) to quarrels about Church style. One was to say that one’s own party was correct and other parties were wrong. The other was to try to comprehend all approaches, accepting the tensions and paradoxes as the price of comprehensiveness. Most Anglicans probably came to accept comprehensiveness in theory, but many readily slipped into more partisan views in practice. The ways in which Anglicans discussed diversity and comprehension was key to their denominational identity. Until the 1960s and often later, many parishes knew whether they wanted rectors who were high-church or low-church, and many bishops knew whether they wanted high- or low-church diocesan staff members. In 1950 the dean of the cathedral at Ottawa, Howard Clark, was a candidate to be general secretary of the GBRE and had reason to believe that he had been appointed. His biographer reports that the chair of the board, the evangelical archbishop of Rupert’s Land, blackballed him in large part because of his liberal catholicism.39 Nine years later Clark was primate, and very soon afterward the evangelicals at Church House were being replaced with liberal catholics. Because comprehensiveness was an Anglican objective, it was customary for many years in General Synod and in larger dioceses to balance persons of diverse styles on the committees and boards of the Church. On the Prayer Book Revision Committee of 1943–59, for example, Ramsay Armitage (1889–1984), principal of Wycliffe College, sat side by side with Roland Palmer (1891–1985), an Anglican monk who began the Canadian house of the Society of St. John the Evangelist—a distinguished evangelical and a distinguished catholic, working together amicably. Similarly, in the diocese of Toronto it was an unwritten rule before 1990 that a senior professor from Wycliffe and a senior professor from Trinity would be among the diocesan delegates to General Synod. In General Synod during the 1960s, and in several dioceses, that strategy of comprehension was put on the shelf. One rationale was that questions of Church style had become old-fashioned and recognizing the divisions tended to perpetuate them. Another reason was that the new bureaucratic model of governance saw theological diversity as an inefficient luxury. The Price-Waterhouse report of 1969, the blueprint for the reorganization of General Synod (chapter 5), recommended several criteria for appointing members to General Synod committees, none of which recognized the value of theological balance or dialog. Finally, theological minorities could not gain a foothold in bureaucratic systems of governance because they were virtually powerless to assert their rights. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, feminists had a place in the Women’s Unit at General Synod and evangelicals had a place on the committee on evangelism, but neither group had the clout to place its representatives on the powerful Doctrine and Worship Committee, whose membership, although formally appointed by General Synod and the primate, was actually controlled by insiders.

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questions about anglican church style When Michael Peers became primate in 1986, he quietly reinstated the principle of comprehensiveness through those many appointments to General Synod committees or national task forces where he had control or influence. He also appointed a highly comprehensive Primate’s Theological Commission in 1996 to help bring diverse Anglican points of view into intentional dialog.40 Such efforts usually promoted the mutual respect of people with different opinions. But not all groups could accept comprehension when confronted with hard issues where passions ran high and compromise positions were difficult to find, such as the ordination of noncelibate gay Anglicans (chapter 6).

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Conclusion Church style is frequently a helpful interpretive category, and sometimes a necessary one, for making sense of the history of Canadian Anglicanism. To be sure, dangers lurk when any interpretive lens is used. Giving labels to Church parties may make them seem more monolithic and theologically consistent than they were. Moreover, historical personalities and events are always too complicated to be explained by any single interpretive category. The dispute between Bishop Hills and Dean Cridge in Victoria, for example, an argument between a tractarian and an evangelical, was also an argument between a successful candidate for bishop and a failed rival as well as an argument between the Hudson’s Bay chaplain in a company town and an outsider recently arrived from the mother country. Similarly, the dispute between Gray and Coster in New Brunswick, an argument between an evangelical and a high-church Anglican, was also an argument between the failed and the successful candidate for the archdeaconry of New Brunswick. But so frequently did Anglicans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries identify “churchmanship” as a motivation for their own decisions about Christian faith and Church business that historians cannot entirely ignore it. Because the Anglican Church originated as a national establishment and had no confessional tests for membership, it always comprehended a diversity of theological positions. That diversity generated debates about episcopal and clerical authority, lay ministry, and ecumenical relations, among other things. By the 1840s it was generating differences in styles of worship; by the 1850s differences in approaches to synodical government; and by the 1860s different institutions, including mission committees, newspapers, hymn books, and theological schools for each party. Many, perhaps most, Anglicans naturally avoided both parties but could not ignore them, and their sense of their Church could not help but be influenced by them. The feuding could be bitter because Victorian Canadians took religion very, very seriously. Bad tempers were exacerbated by the leadership style of the day, for bishops were typically very much part of the fray, not referees or conciliators as they more frequently try to be today. These Victorian controversies demonstrate that what it meant to be an Angli-

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anglicans in canada can was not to be identified with any one Church style, notwithstanding that each party claimed to represent true Anglicanism. Instead, being an Anglican was to engage in, or at least to be touched by, conversations and debates that addressed questions of Church style. Around World War I, the old Church parties were in decline, and new ecclesiologies and Church styles were overtaking them. It is not that the divisive questions that had originally created the Church party and the evangelical party had been settled or were no longer relevant, but rather that the radical polarization between the two groups had given way to a multiplicity of Church styles—conservative catholic, liberal catholic, charismatic, social activist, evangelical, and liturgical movement, to name a few. Notwithstanding the diversification of Church style, polarization was by no means a thing of the past, as controversies about liturgical change, the ordination of women, and homosexuality demonstrated. Even as the twenty-first century dawned, many parishes, sometimes whole dioceses and virtually all seminaries, inclined either toward or away from particular Church styles; others sought to comprehend diversity. Disagreement about Church style was an essential of Canadian Anglican identity, but the idea of identity implied limits to diversity, limits that continued to be tested.

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Notes 1. Toronto Synod Journal (1879): 27. 2. John Irwin Cooper, The Blessed Communion: The Origins and History of the Diocese of Montreal, 1760–1960 (Montreal: Archives Committee of the Diocese of Montreal, 1960), 152. 3. John Cragg Farthing, Recollections of the Right Reverend John Cragg Farthing, Bishop of Montreal, 1909–1939 (Montreal: N.p. 1946?), 120. 4. Archibald Lang Fleming, Archibald the Arctic (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1956), 276–77. 5. Quoted in S. D. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), 122. 6. George W. Hill, “History of St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, No. IV,” Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society 3 (1883): 13–70; Reginald V. Harris, The Church of Saint Paul in Halifax, Nova Scotia: 1749–1949 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1949); Philip Griffin-Allwood, “The Evangelical Doctrinal Consensus: An Implication of the St. Paul’s Secession of 1825,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 36 (1994), 5–18 (hereafter JCCHS). 7. Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966– ), 9: 338–40 (hereafter DCB). 8. T. R. Millman, “Canadian Anglican Journalism in the Nineteenth Century,” JCCHS 3 (1959): 1–19. On party quarrels in Toronto in general, see Harry E. Turner, “The Evangelical Movement in the Church of England in the Diocese of Toronto 1839–1879,” M.A. thesis, University of Toronto, 1959. 9. The minister in 1843 was Featherstone Lake Osler of Tecumseh, Canada West, and the resolution at the clerical meeting was reported by S. B. Ardag. Both are cited in Turner, “The

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questions about anglican church style Evangelical Movement,” 37. The editor who resigned was John Kent, a layperson. See also A. N. Bethune, Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan D.D., LL.D., First Bishop of Toronto (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1870), 159; and “Alexander Neil Bethune,” DCB 10: 53–57. 10. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols., 3d ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1971), 1: 250–71. 11. H. E. Turner, “Protestantism and Progress: The Church Association of the Diocese of Toronto 1873–1879,” JCCHS 22 (1980): 1–28; Christopher F. Headon, “The Influence of the Oxford Movement upon the Church of England. . . ,” Ph.D. diss., McGill University, Montreal, 1974; Christopher Headon, “Developments in Canadian Anglican Worship in Eastern and Central Canada 1850–1868,” JCCHS 17 (1975): 26–36. 12. [United Church of England and Ireland, Province of Canada, Provincial Synod: Fourth Session, Montreal, 1868], The Debates on Ritualism in the Provincial Synod (Montreal: John Lovell, 1868), 27, Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 06427. 13. See, for example, Gary W. Graber, Ritual Legislation in the Victorian Church of England: Antecedents and Passage of the Public Worship Regulation Act, 1874 (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993); and Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 1: 491–505. 14. DCB 11: 73–77. 15. J. E. B. Munson, “The Oxford Movement by the End of the Nineteenth Century: The Anglo-Catholic Clergy,” Church History 44 (1975): 382–95. 16. Millman, “Canadian Anglican Journalism.” 17. Feild in DCB 10: 278–81; Frederick Jones, “Early Opposition to Bishop Feild of Newfoundland,” JCCHS 16 (1974) 30–41; and William Ketchum, The Life and Work of the Most Reverend John Medley, D.D.: First Bishop of Fredericton and Metropolitan of Canada (St. John: J. and A. McMillan, 1893). 18. Alan Gregg Finley, “‘Habits of Reverence and Awe’: Bishop John Medley and the Promise of Ecclesiology,” JCCHS 35 (1993): 3–22. 19. William Westfall, The Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2002), 96. 20. Henry Melville, The Rise and Progress of Trinity College, Toronto (Toronto: H. Rowsell, 1852), 116. 21. Donald Schurman, A Bishop and His People: John Travers Lewis and the Anglican Diocese of Ontario, 1862–1902 (Kingston, 1991), 67–70; Donald Swainson, ed., St. George’s Cathedral: Two Hundred Years of Community (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1991). 22. Alan L. Hayes, By Grace Co-Workers: Building the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 1780–1989 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1989), 48. 23. D. F. Cook, “A Survey of Hymnody in the Church of England in Eastern Canada to 1909,” JCCHS 8 (1965): 36–61. 24. Henry Roper, “Evangelical-Tractarian Conflict over Divinity Education at the University of King’s College,” JCCHS 36 (1994): 37–57. 25. Farthing, Recollections, 121. 26. Schurman, A Bishop and His People, 192; see also DCB 13: 598–99. 27. DCB 10: 205–10; T. A. Reed, ed., A History of the University of Trinity College Toronto, 1852–1952 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), 65–69. 28. DCB 11: 916–18. 29. Bruce S. Elliott, “Ritualism and the Beginnings of the Reformed Episcopal Movement in Ottawa,” JCCHS 27 (1985): 18–41 (quotation on 27).

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30. One of these advertisements appeared in Evangelical Churchman, Feb. 28, 1895, 104. 31. “The Ottawa Anglican Churchmen’s Union,” Canadian Churchman, March 21, 1895, 179–80; “Crisis in the Diocese on Ontario,” Evangelical Churchman, Feb. 28, 1895, 99. 32. For the following discussion I have relied primarily on self-descriptions of the organizations in their published literature and on their Web-sites. 33. The quotation is from , accessed on July 15, 2003. 34. Andrew Wetmore, “The Briefcase Boys,” JCCHS 25 (1983): 74–92, at 82. 35. The Ontario region of the Order of St. Luke maintains its own Web-site: . 36. The Association of Vineyard Churches, founded by John Wimber (1934–97), began as a local church-plant in Los Angeles in 1974 and now claims more than eight hundred churches worldwide. 37. The quotation is from , accessed on July 15, 2003. 38. Wendy Fletcher-Marsh, Like Water on Rock (Guelph, Ont.: Artemis, 2002), 84. 39. William A. Harshaw, A Transforming Influence: A Biographical Memoir of Archbishop Howard H. Clark (Toronto: Harfolk Press, 1993), 80–81. 40. The Primate’s Theological Commission has so far published Longing for God: Anglicans Talk about Revelation, Nature, Culture, and Authority (Toronto:Anglican Book Centre, 2001), and Turning to God: Anglicans Talk about Sin, Grace, and the Christian Life (Toronto: ABC Publications, 2002).

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chapter 5

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Questions about the Church in the Modern World When the bishop of Natal in 1862 claimed that the Old Testament contained errors of historical fact, his metropolitan excommunicated him, prominent evangelicals such as Lord Shaftesbury joined with prominent tractarians such as Edward Pusey to denounce him, and the whole Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops condemned him heartily. Fifty years later, such views had moved from the realm of the heretical to the realm of the debatable. Fifty years after that, they had become a staple in the theological education of all Anglican clergy. Anglicans had adapted their theology to modern historical criticism. In the 1880s, and for many years thereafter, churches, church-based organizations, and ecumenical associations such as the YMCA were the chief welfare agencies and social-service providers in Canadian communities. By the 1940s, however, Anglicans gladly left most social-service work to the governments. They had adapted their understanding of ministry to modern theories of civil government. In the 1850s the churches Anglicans built were usually neo-Gothic in architectural style, symbolizing the importance of their medieval inheritance. A century later, the churches they built were more often inspired by contemporary models. Anglicans had adapted their devotional sensibilities to modern aesthetics and were affirming architecturally that the Gospel should appear relevant to the modern world. In the 1860s, diocesan administration amounted to the bishop and one or two clergy who assisted with correspondence. By the 1970s, larger dioceses were administered out of executive offices with executive assistants, business departments, public relations personnel, program officers, and other staff. Their activities were guided by policy statements, books of instructions for the clergy, and elaborate administrative procedures for most eventualities. Anglicans had adapted their systems of governance to modern management theory. In the 1860s Anglicans recognized that Christianity was the foundation and

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center of political, social, and intellectual activity in Canada. A century later they recognized that Christianity was on the margins of modern life. One of the principal themes for Anglicanism in Canada has been its response to modernity. On the surface, it appears that the Church resisted modernity during the nineteenth century in order to protect its identity, but in the twentieth century it accommodated modernity in order to be more effective in ministering in its cultural context. There is considerable evidence for this view in the writings of leaders, synod reports, policy statements, organizational documents, public relations presentations, and sermons. From a closer perspective, however, some Anglicans in every generation have resisted change, and some have joined trends. The extent to which the Church should be open to its surrounding culture has been a perennial issue for Anglican debate. In the nineteenth century, many rank-and-file Anglicans were more progressive than most of their leaders; in the twentieth century, they were more suspicious of the claims of modernity. Modernity is a much-studied subject. In Europe and North America it has had five chief characteristics: —the scientific spirit, which is the conviction that the most reliable way to discover truth—perhaps the only way—is objective and value-free research into universally accessible data; —the specialization of life and knowledge as exemplified by the tendency to compartmentalize family, work, social, religious, political, economic, and other relationships; —bureaucracy, that is, the rationalized exercise of authority in both the public and private sectors through specialized offices with impersonal procedures; —social interventionism, which is the view that the world can and should be made better through technology, government legislation, and social controls; and —a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” the distrust of others’ motivations, behavior, beliefs, value systems, religious systems, and historical writings on the grounds they are controlled by such unconscious natural forces as class interest (as for Karl Marx), the will to power (as for Friedrich Nietzsche), and sexuality and repression (as for Sigmund Freud).1

Not everyone agrees that “modernity” is finally helpful as a historical category. Some practices that originated in the modern era lacked any of the characteristics of modernity, or they had one or two but not others. And some practices that originated before the modern era met some of the criteria of modernity. My excuse for discussing modernity is that Anglicans used the word modern frequently to describe these or similar characteristics. Sometimes they used the term descriptively to mean contemporary attitudes and ways of doing

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questions about the church in the modern world things. At other times they used it normatively to mean attitudes and ways of doing things that corrected the errors of the benighted past. On still other occasions, however, critics used the term ironically to mean attitudes and ways of doing things that had recently preempted something better and represented only a passing stage in history. Modernity was challenging the thought and practice of the Church of England by the 1850s. The willingness to accept modern knowledge as a theological authority is called “liberalism.” Although liberal theology was significant in England and the United States soon after 1850 or 1860, it could scarcely be found in Canada before the 1880s. The delay may confirm the sociological theory that an industrial economy is a prerequisite of modernity; Canada was not significantly industrialized before 1900. In the twentieth century, Canadian Anglican leaders generally embraced the modern project, particularly in relation to theology, management, and ministry, which will be discussed here. But many others raised questions about it.

Theology and Modernity

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The Problem of Faith in the Modern World Modernity undermined confidence in religious truth by disdaining truth-claims that were not objectively and scientifically verifiable. The scriptural view that truth is known through faith, and faith is given only to some by grace, impressed modernity as an admission that the essential data of the Christian religion were not universally accessible and therefore not scientific. Religion might be a helpful opinion, a personally enriching spirituality, an ideological foundation for community, a meaningful myth, or a support for morality, but it was not knowledge in the way that chemistry and physics were knowledge. Accordingly, where modern knowledge disagreed with the Bible, so much the worse for the Bible. By the 1860s geologists were refuting the Bible in regard to the age of the earth; biologists and evolutionists were refuting the Bible in regard to its story that human life was created in six days; and historians were refuting the Bible, or at least poking large holes in it, in regard to its historical narratives. Christians found themselves faced with the choice of rejecting modern knowledge or accommodating it. Those who chose to reject modern knowledge were sometimes called fundamentalists, and in the early part of the twentieth century fundamentalism was a plausible option for Canadian Anglicans. Those who chose to accommodate modern knowledge could pick from several approaches. The three that became most common among Canadian Anglicans were liberal evangelicalism, liberal catholicism, and neoorthodoxy.

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Fundamentalism In retrospect, fundamentalism seems to have been doomed to failure from the start. Refusing to receive the modern presuppositions of science was like trying to hold back the sea by putting a finger in a hole in a dike. But in the early part of the century the cultural “paradigm shift” to a new structure of understanding had not yet been completed. Before the 1920s many Anglicans thought that modern scientific inquiry was one more passing intellectual fashion. The term fundamentalist is historically connected with The Fundamentals, a series of sixty-four essays published in twelve volumes from 1910 to 1915 and designed to expose the intellectually impoverished assumptions and unacknowledged agenda of modern biblical criticism and liberal theology. Thanks to the generosity of two brothers, Lyman and Milton Stewart, in southern California who had made a fortune in oil, three million copies were published and sent free of charge to Christian ministers, Sunday school superintendents, missionaries, and seminary professors and students across North America. Although the term fundamentalist has come to connote a zealous, anti-intellectual attachment to irrational beliefs, articles in The Fundamentals were intended to be academically respectable and serious-minded. At first the fundamentalist movement appealed to many Anglican conservative evangelicals, tractarians, and old-style high-church members; indeed, in the 1910s those three rival groups sometimes joined against the modernist threat. By the 1920s, however, the day of fundamentalism had passed among Canadian Anglicans, although it endured in twentieth-century Protestantism as a whole, especially in the United States and, through American Protestant missionaries, in developing nations. One contributor to The Fundamentals was a Canadian Anglican evangelical named Dyson Hague (1857–1935), who was well known across the breadth of the Canadian Church as a fluent preacher, a devoted commentator on the prayer book, an aficionado of Church music, and a sharp-tongued controversialist.2 When he wrote “The History of Higher Criticism” (excerpted as Document 32), he was rector of the Bishop Cronyn Memorial Church in London, Ontario. He also had significant ministries at St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, and the Church of the Redeemer, Toronto, and for several years he taught at Wycliffe College, Toronto. “Higher critics” sought to reconstruct the hidden sources of the Bible and the invisible processes by which it was composed. (“Lower criticism” meant the kind of linguistic analysis and evaluation of manuscripts required to establish the probable original text of the Bible.)

Liberal Evangelicalism Liberal evangelicals characteristically acknowledged the value of science in its own sphere but held that the Gospel rightly understood lay beyond its reach. They

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questions about the church in the modern world were willing to jettison the story of a six-day creation in Genesis, Moses’ authorship of the first five books of the Old Testament, Jonah’s whale, and other parts of the Bible that did not square with science and historical criticism. They were also willing—in fact, eager—to jettison certain catholic-minded claims that sounded historical but were scientifically unverifiable, such as an orderly succession of bishops from the time of the Apostles, a threefold order of ministry descended from the New Testament church, and a standard primitive liturgical order derived from Jesus himself. They claimed that none of these things was essential. In fact, no rule about Church order was essential, and neither were dogmatic propositional statements about God. What, then, was essential? A sense of God’s love, a personal relationship with Jesus, and a Christian moral ethic. A breach was opening between conservative and liberal evangelicals by the 1880s in Canada. Perhaps the best-documented example concerned William Rainsford (1850–1933), who wrote about it in two autobiographical works.3 The young Irish minister was an internationally known revivalist during the 1870s, and in 1878 he accepted an appointment as assistant minister at St. James Cathedral, Toronto, then one of the leading evangelical Anglican churches in the country. Soon he was afflicted with doubts about his evangelical message, something he could not square with higher biblical criticism and the theory of evolution. He did not share those doubts, but his congregation suspected something was wrong. His preaching, it was said, was losing its conviction and fire; some ultra-evangelical lay stalwarts in the congregation even suggested privately that he consider resigning. Rainsford left in 1882 for St. George’s Episcopal Church, New York, then a struggling parish that he helped develop into a model of liberal evangelical preaching and social ministry. Rainsford was much influenced by an even greater preacher, Phillips Brooks (1835–93), the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Boston, and briefly bishop of Massachusetts, who had also broken with conservative evangelicals over their doctrinal scrupulousness. The phrase Brooks used to describe his liberal evangelicalism was “broad church,” a term that had begun to be employed around 1850. Another liberal evangelical casualty of Canadian Anglican conservatism was Frederick Julius Steen (1867–1903), a Wycliffe College graduate who in 1896 was appointed to teach apologetics and Church history at Montreal Diocesan Theological College, with a part-time staff position at Christ Church Cathedral. He was soon being accused of holding irregular views on evolution and the Atonement, and in 1900 the board of the college asked him to resign, which he did. Archbishop Bond then refused to let him preach in the cathedral and ordered him to return his clergy license. Steen took legal counsel and sued the archbishop, who then, on mature consideration, changed his mind and let him continue at the cathedral. The stress of the controversy destroyed Steen’s health, and he died two years later.4 The best-known Anglican liberal evangelical in Canada, and during his lifetime one of the best-known clergy of any denomination in the country, was

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anglicans in canada Henry John Cody (1868–1951). “A poor boy from rural Ontario,” as his most recent biographer describes him, Cody studied at the University of Toronto and Wycliffe College. Throughout his ministry he was identified with St. Paul’s Church, Bloor Street, Toronto, which he served first as student assistant, then as assistant, and finally as rector. His preaching attracted huge crowds. The sermon excerpted as Document 33 was preached at the Toronto coliseum during civic celebrations of the centenary of the city of Toronto in the midst of the depression. By then Cody was president of the University of Toronto. He had preached on exactly the same scriptural text in 1909 on the Sunday after he was defeated by the clergy in an election for bishop of Toronto. On that occasion he had launched the expansion of St. Paul’s Church, which, when completed in 1913, seated three thousand and was the largest church structure in Ontario. Cody’s preaching filled the great, cavernous nave Sunday after Sunday.5

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Liberal Catholicism For most of the nineteenth century the term liberal catholic was an oxymoron. In 1864 the pope, in his famous (or notorious) “Syllabus of Errors,” condemned the proposition that any pope “can and ought to reconcile himself with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilization.”6 As for the Anglo-Catholic movement, it had been launched in self-conscious opposition to the liberal agenda of the British government; its opening salvo, a sermon on “national apostasy,” attacked liberalism explicitly.7 But when progress, liberalism, and modern civilization refused to go away, many Anglicans of a catholic temper looked for ways to reconcile them with the Gospel. The pioneer spokesperson and popularizer of Anglican liberal catholicism was Charles Gore (1853–1932). An accomplished scholar and bishop of three English dioceses in succession, he “did more than any other single person to carry the high churchmen into the modern age.”8 In 1889 Gore dared use the word myth to describe the narrative of Jonah and other Old Testament stories in an essay on the “Holy Spirit and inspiration” published in Lux Mundi, which he edited. Even with coaxing explanations and gentle qualifications, that word as applied to God’s word was very provocative to Victorian Anglicans. A few years later Gore was leading a movement to dispense with reciting the Athanasian Creed in Anglican worship, the occasional use of which was directed by the Book of Common Prayer. Like liberal evangelicalism, liberal catholicism affirmed that the heart of the Gospel was in a sphere that modern knowledge could not touch. Unlike liberal evangelicalism, which found the heart of the Gospel in an individual’s personal relationship with Christ, liberal catholicism found it in the community’s sacramental relationship with Christ. The community of faith, it was argued, was logically before any individual believer and chronologically prior to the Scriptures. It had a centuries-long history, proven dependability, and consistency of

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questions about the church in the modern world witness. And where liberal evangelicalism, like other forms of Protestantism, ascribed theological authority to the Bible, liberal catholicism ascribed theological authority to the community’s tradition, which included the Bible but other things as well. Here modern knowledge offered a positive advantage to liberal catholics because it raised doubts about the authority of the Bible, or at least about the interpretation of the Bible. Scholars had proven, it seemed, that the Bible was inaccessible to ordinary believers insofar as its interpretation required years of specialized linguistic, historical, and literary study, the conclusions of which were inevitably uncertain. “The power of naked appeal to the infallible book . . . was exactly what the New Learning of our day has cut at the root,” Gore wrote in one of his most important books. Tradition, by sharp contrast, was a living thing, constantly replenished by fresh witnesses and continually revitalized by the life of the community. Gore reminded readers that Christ wrote no books. Christ’s method, he said, was to found a “close fellowship saturated with a certain moral and theological and sacramental tradition.”9 In Canada, the first important exponent of the movement in its early phase was Hollingworth Tully Kingdon (1835–1907), whom John Medley handpicked as his successor as bishop of Fredericton. Scarcely more than one person in a million knows his work today, but in 1900 he was one of the most intellectually influential scholar-bishops in the Anglican world. In lectures at General Theological Seminary, New York, published as God Incarnate, he quoted approvingly from the controversial Lux Mundi and explained that a day of creation in Genesis was “not confined to what we call twenty-four hours”; that the important thing in the creation story was not the narrative detail but the principle of “orderly process, orderly progress” under “the ever-present care of the Creator”; and that the substance of the biblical account of the fall of man is true, even if “with some of the faithful, we regard the form in which the history is told as an allegory or a parable.”10 The most influential Anglican liberal catholic theologian in Canada was Eugene Fairweather (1920–2002) of Trinity College, Toronto. But he was not a liberal catholic in the sense that Charles Gore was a liberal catholic. Fairweather criticized Gore for flirting much too closely with “christological monstrosities.” Instead, Fairweather gave an Anglican context to neothomism, the twentieth-century revival of the thought of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, who had his own way of reconciling the Gospel with secular philosophies. Toronto, where Fairweather studied and taught, was a principal international center of Roman Catholic neothomism through the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, founded by the great Étienne Gilson (1884–1978). The thorough, systematic, and probing theologizing so characteristic of Thomas Aquinas made Fairweather very impatient with the philosophical naïveté he found in ordinary liberal catholicism and in tractarianism as well. Unfortunately, Fairweather wrote no magnum opus. Aside from antholo-

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anglicans in canada gies and two or three modest monographs in the early part of his career, his wide influence was through scholarly and popular articles, lectures and academic supervision, personal contacts, Anglican-Roman Catholic dialog, and contributions to theological committees and task forces of the diocese of Toronto, General Synod, and other provinces of the Anglican communion. The scholarly article excerpted as Document 34 reflects a characteristic liberal catholic outlook in its presentation of community and episcopacy, its sympathy toward modern critical method, and the assumption, seen most sharply in the last sentence, that tradition safeguards doctrine from falling into the anarchy of individualistic private judgment. With Fairweather’s retirement from Trinity and his student William Crockett’s retirement from the Vancouver School of Theology, neither of whom was replaced by a permanent Anglican theologian, liberal catholicism no longer had an intellectual center in Canadian Anglicanism. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it was still very much in the air and probably the dominant theological style.

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Reformed Neoorthodoxy Leaders of the neoorthodox movement rejected the way of liberalism but knew they could not return to premodern thought. Their path was to update Reformed theology, that is, theology in the tradition of John Calvin, the great sixteenth-century humanist Protestant reformer of Geneva. It is usual to date the beginning of neoorthodoxy to 1919, when a Swiss pastor and theologian named Karl Barth (1886–1968) published an epoch-making commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans. Neoorthodoxy, like liberal evangelicalism and liberal catholicism, located the Gospel in a place that science and natural reason could not attack. For neoorthodoxy it was history, more precisely the connection of human history and divine history. Neoorthodoxy constantly reminded Christians that because God in Christ had already acted decisively in history, their role was not to organize the future but to respond to God’s action. The ultimate and diabolical extreme of modernity, from this point of view, was Nazism because it sought ruthlessly to reconstruct the world according to certain self-serving ideological commitments. Barth and other neoorthodox German and Swiss theologians and pastors, including the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45), were among the most committed and courageous of Hitler’s opponents. Neoorthodoxy worked comfortably with key Calvinist ideas: the sovereignty of God revealed in Christ, the sufficient authority of Scripture in theological discourse, the certainty that God’s love would triumph in history, and God’s decisive initiative in calling humanity into covenant through Christ. A chief difference between the older Calvinists and the neoorthodox was that the former seemed to emphasize human sin and the necessity of mortifying the flesh,

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questions about the church in the modern world whereas neo-Calvinists wanted to emphasize God’s love and promise of life. Barth was critical of Calvin: “What we have called the divine call to advance, is in Calvin so overshadowed by the divine summons to halt that it can hardly be heard at all.”11 Although Reformed theology had enjoyed a firm place in Anglicanism in the centuries after the Reformation, its influence had been severely eroded in the nineteenth century. Anglicans throughout most of the twentieth century were generally cool to Barth, and it has been argued that it was because English bishops were suspicious of his theology that so few of them joined him in his early opposition to Hitler. It was only toward the end of the twentieth century that Barthianism made significant inroads in Canadian Anglicanism, and that was primarily through a succession of theologians at Wycliffe College in Toronto. Oliver O’Donovan taught from 1977 to 1982 before being called to a Regius professorship at Oxford University, John Webster taught from 1986 to 1996 before being called to the Lady Margaret Chair at Oxford, and Joseph Mangina began teaching at Wycliffe in 1998. Webster was particularly influential in Canada through his numerous doctoral students; a portion of his lecture to an annual meeting of the Scholarly Engagement with Anglican Doctrine organization in Toronto in June 1997 is reproduced as Document 35. Canadian Anglicans therefore had several options for responding to modernity, and they debated which might be best or at least energetically disparaged the alternatives they disliked.

Church Management and Modernity

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Characteristics of Modern Management Among modernity’s most cited characteristics are bureaucratization and the rationalization of management. Traditional societies are managed by identifiable leaders or a hierarchy of identifiable leaders; in modern societies, administrative functions are distributed among specialized departments (bureaus). Traditional societies typically maintain order and justice through complex systems of social networking and patronage; modern societies typically maintain order and justice through impersonal procedures developed by experts and administered by a clerical staff. Leaders in traditional societies are expected to maintain the status quo; bureaucrats in modern societies are part of a process for making continual improvements in efficiency and public service. In traditional economies, money plays a subsidiary role and may not exist; in modern economies, money is the criterion against which all other activities and assets are measured. One of the distinctives of modern management is that it seeks to find a rationally calculated cost for everything, including time and labor, for bookkeeping purposes.

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Anglican Transitions to Modern Management Until the late nineteenth century the Anglican Church operated traditionally. At the diocesan level, bishops gave the kind of personal, discretionary leadership characteristic of traditional societies, operating through networks of personal relationships. At the parish level, clergy played the same role. Bishops and clergy often approached administration, accountancy, and record-keeping with distaste. Historians who work in nineteenth-century Canadian Anglican history are accustomed to finding very thin archives. Among the few notable exceptions was John Strachan, who had a strong sense of his historical importance and kept drafts of his correspondence. By the early twentieth century, Anglican Church management in Canada was being modernized. Bishops and clergy learned that it was inefficient, and possibly legally actionable, to exercise authority in unilateral and informal ways. Increasingly, they compartmentalized the work of the Church, organized synods, delegated authority to specialists, developed systems of oversight and accountability, established formal standards and procedures, hired a clerical staff, made sure everything was in writing, centralized operations, and, in general, implemented modern management theory. Sometimes they learned about financial accountability the hard way. Defalcations by the land agent for the Province of Rupert’s Land, a loss discovered in 1932, cost Anglicans more than $750,000.12 It is convenient here to focus on the management of the national Church, but similar stories can be told for the dioceses, particularly for large dioceses with urban centers. In the bureaucratization of General Synod four boards were created between 1902 and 1959, field secretaries and a clerical staff were hired, capital fund-raising campaigns were undertaken, a pension plan was established, a headquarters was purchased on Jarvis Street in Toronto, and canon law and regulations were written (chapter 4). All of this was modern, but none of it was quite modern enough. Modern management required a systematized cycle of evaluating processes and results, setting goals and objectives, and designing and implementing strategies, all with scrupulous attention to financial costs and benefits.

The Anglican Commission Those seeking to modernize the operations of the Anglican Church, therefore, wanted to analyze its organization and evaluate its effectiveness in serving the present age. In September 1927 General Synod set up the “Anglican National Commission . . . for the purpose of making a complete survey of all the varied problems and needs of the Church.”13 Thirty-eight members (all men) were appointed. Of these, the Committee of Seven was appointed in November 1927 to write an interim report. In June 1928 three field commissioners were appointed to travel the coun-

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questions about the church in the modern world

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try and survey “problems and needs”: Derwyn Owen, the bishop of Niagara, later the primate; Sydney Gould, general secretary of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC); and Francis H. Gisborne, a theologically conversant lawyer and chancellor of the diocese of Ottawa. They made seven long journeys in Canada between 1928 and 1931; held more than five hundred conferences; consulted with thousands of clergy and laity, including women and young people; distributed questionnaires; and collected statistics. The commission published its report in 1931 (excerpted as Document 36). It was the most far-reaching, significant single project of corporate self-criticism in the history of the Anglican Church of Canada, and its great theme was the need to modernize the institutional and theological forms of its life. The report represented a critical defining moment. True, few of its recommendations were immediately adopted. But sooner or later a great many issues it identified in 1931 were addressed. For example, the important organizational recommendation that “the office of the primate be enlarged so as to enable the holder thereof to have a greater influence in the general life and work of the Church” resulted in a new primacy canon in 1934.14 The structure of General Synod was reviewed over a period of years, and in 1943 a major rationalization took place. Missions, education, and social service were brought under the ostensible control of the Executive Council; a unified financial management was instituted; and General Synod bought Church House on Jarvis Street, Toronto, from the MSCC. A new fund-raising campaign, the Anglican Advance Appeal, was launched in 1946. In 1954 the first general secretary of General Synod was appointed, and in 1955 the first general treasurer. Also in 1955, General Synod accepted the Anglican National Commission’s recommendation that the name of the Church of England in Canada be changed. In 1958 General Synod took control of the Canadian Churchman.

Howard Clark and the 1960s The great period for the institutional modernization of Canadian Anglicanism was the turbulent 1960s, during the primacy of Howard Clark (1903–83). Clark was born in Fort McLeod, Northwest Territories (now Alberta), where his father was a Mountie. The father periodically deserted the family, leaving his children to be raised in their maternal grandmother’s household in Toronto. “God was a living reality,” Clark recalled, “and the Church was one of the most important things there were, and so, in consequence, I am a once-born person.”15 Liberal catholicism appealed to Clark. Struggling with poverty, illness, and bad marks in university, and taking several years out of his schooling to work as an actuary, he managed to complete his programs in arts and divinity at Trinity College and was ordained priest at the age of twenty-nine. From 1932 to 1953 he served the cathedral in Ottawa, first as assistant, then priest-in-charge, then rector, and then dean. He was elected bishop of Edmonton, and in 1959 primate,

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anglicans in canada and later metropolitan of the ecclesiastical Province of Rupert’s Land. By inclination he was a conservative reformer, defending change but resisting radicalism. With his uneasy health and many responsibilities outside the primacy, he was not, many thought, fully and effectively in charge. Critics said he followed the lead of the businesspeople on the National Executive Council and the confident young men to whom he gave the control of Church House. But if Clark did follow their lead it was because he agreed with them that the theory and practice of Christianity needed to be adapted to the modern situation. He retired in 1970, had a serious stroke in 1972, and served most of his remaining years as chancellor of Trinity College. As primate, Clark and his advisers wanted the Church to be more businesslike. They created a “Unit of Research,” which in its first report to General Synod in 1962 promised to “utilize the latest techniques of social science to aid in planning for the work in the present and future”: the agenda of modernity.16 Its first task was to assist dioceses in gathering statistical and demographic information as a prelude to strategic planning. Its second task was to study the clergy sociologically. In 1964 it hired William Pickering, a sociologist from Winnipeg, where Clark was bishop. Pickering sent questionnaires to the clergy in several dioceses, evaluated the results, and published Taken for Granted on the eve of the General Synod of 1967. Brief selections are reprinted as Document 37. Clark’s major project of modernization was rationalizing and bureaucratizing the functions of the national Church. Before his primacy, the MSCC, the General Board of Religious Education (GBRE), the Council for Social Service (CSS), and, to a lesser extent, the more recent Department of Information and Stewardship were virtual fiefdoms (chapter 3). They were directed by general secretaries who had high profiles in the Anglican Church, knew everyone they needed to know and many more besides, made sure they were informed of everything happening in their departments, made unilateral policy and budget decisions that were disguised as the fruits of collaborative committee processes, and generally achieved a great deal. It was personal leadership, and it was very old-fashioned. The trouble with fiefdoms, from the point of view of modern management theory, was that their operations lacked systematic rationality. They were not easily subordinated to general Church policy. Leadership was not readily held accountable. Boards mixed functions that modern management theory preferred to keep separate: evaluating policy, recommending policy, approving policy, and implementing policy. They did not necessarily honor their original terms of reference. Their jurisdictions overlapped untidily. Some, especially in the passing generation, actually preferred irrational, premodern management. As Philip Carrington, the acting primate in 1959, told General Synod, “What are called anomalies, are often ways of getting the best out of a situation by a combination of apparently contradictory forces.”17 But mystical pronouncements were not in fashion in 1959. Most Anglican leaders

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questions about the church in the modern world were agreeing with the views affirmed in a long-range planning report submitted a few years later to General Synod: “In a world come of age, . . . man, taking the planning approach, moves to shape his environment.”18 As early as 1950 the Committee on Reorganization had come into existence, succeeded by the Committee on Organization, which over the years dutifully offered General Synod many recommendations. The most inoffensive of these were sometimes adopted. The committee’s most notable recommendation, debated for three or four years before being accepted in 1965, was to change the Executive Council into the National Executive Council, which had a larger membership and met more frequently than the Executive Council had. That was obviously not modern enough. Clark was under pressure both from within Church House and from outside it to do more, and his advisers made various proposals. In 1966 he appointed a committee on “program, planning, and research,” chaired by Lewis Garnsworthy, the rector of St. John’s Church, York Mills (later bishop of Toronto) and staffed by David Somerville (later bishop of New Westminster). That came closer to the mark, but it was still not on target. About the same time, the NEC recommended the appointment of a management consultant. That proposal was the key that opened the door to full-scale modernization. Edward Netten of Price-Waterhouse in Winnipeg, who had helped Clark update management in the diocese of Rupert’s Land, was hired, and his first report appeared in the General Synod Journal for 1967. It had three parts. Part 1 was a summary of “the setting.” Part 2 identified forty areas for improvement, saving the most comprehensive for last: “40. Modern management program planning and control practices should be adopted. Techniques used by other not-for-profit enterprises, business and government to set objectives, develop operating plans and to control performance compared to plans, could be adopted usefully by the Church.” Netten concluded part 2 with the observation that the faults of Church House “arise from not adapting organizational forms to serve the complex requirements and fast pace of the modern age.” Part 3 contained Netten’s proposals. He recommended scrapping the four boards and reallocating their functions to new committees, primarily the Program Committee. The primate should be the full-time chief executive officer of Church House and without responsibilities in any diocese.19 The proposed plan of organization was entirely accepted, and Clark moved to Toronto as the Church’s first full-time primate. The boards were scrapped, although for legal reasons the formal shell of the MSCC was maintained. The changes were controversial. The Canadian Churchman noted that Netten’s report had not a word to say about the actual purposes of the Church in general or of Church House in particular, as if the intent were to rationalize structures and not to support ministry. Some staff members at Church House grumbled that they were no longer a community but a bureaucracy. It appeared that Church House was no longer giving leadership but doing management, and, indeed, that was the point of the change.

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anglicans in canada Did modernized management achieve what it promised: improve cost controls, accountability, effectiveness, creativity, enthusiasm, and initiative? Did it increase the Christian influence and visibility of the operations of the national Church? What, in the end, should be expected of Church administrations? Canadian Anglicans disagreed among themselves in committee reports, synod speeches, letters and articles in the Church press, and informal conversations.

Ministry and Modernity The principal ministries of the Church at the national level have included foreign and domestic missions, worship, social service, and education. The Anglican Church in Canada modernized all these areas during the twentieth century. Missions are considered in chapter 1, and the other three areas here.

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Worship When General Synod was created in 1893 it received authority over the worship of the Church. For many years it resisted revising the Book of Common Prayer, largely because it was afraid that it might trigger renewed battles over Church style, but finally in 1911 it agreed to move ahead. In 1918 it approved (and ratified in 1921) the first Canadian revision of the Book of Common Prayer. It was intended to be not a full-scale modernization of the book but, as its preface said, a modest adaptation “in order that it may more fully meet the needs of the Church in this age and in this Dominion.”20 Similarly, the second round of Canadian liturgical revision from 1943 to 1959, although more far-reaching than the first round, still aimed at an enrichment and adaptation for the Canadian situation rather than at a modern text. Modernization was, however, very much part of the agenda of the influential school of thought known as the liturgical movement (chapter 4), a network of advocacy and scholarship for the renewal of worship. The first fruit of this movement in the Anglican world was the “parish communion movement” of the late 1930s. Its goal was weekly parish eucharist followed by a coffee hour, a pattern at that time almost unknown in Canadian Anglicanism that would become standard by the late 1970s. One of several rationales for the new pattern was that it was well suited to the needs of modern people, who, uprooted by industrialization from small towns and traditional societies, were eager to experience true community. The most conspicuous project of the liturgical movement was the rewriting of liturgical texts, a process seriously taken up in many parts of the Anglican world after the Anglican Congress of 1954. The usual rationale for liturgical revision was that all the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer currently in use around the world were medieval in language, form, theology, and general liturgical understanding and were therefore hopelessly out of touch

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questions about the church in the modern world with modern biblical, theological, and liturgical thought as well as with the social and pastoral realities of the modern world. Critics charged that the revisers of liturgies were secularizing Christian thought. The revisers denied that charge, explaining that their intention was to return to the purer liturgy of the early Church. But, they argued, worship should indeed take modernity seriously. Modern language, for instance, was friendlier than traditional language. Modern liturgical scholarship should be respected. Liturgy should accommodate some of the tastes of modern people, who, for example, preferred to choose prayers from a variety of alternatives, wanted a greater participation in worship, and were too busy to want long passages of Scripture read to them. General Synod advanced the liturgical movement through two committees, the Committee on Public Worship (before 1969) and the Doctrine and Worship Committee (after 1969). In 1971 General Synod directed D&W to produce several alternative rites, and in 1980 it mandated the “development of a book of alternative services.” The Book of Alternative Services was published in 1985. Its introduction repays a close reading for its rationale for the modernization of worship. It was vital, the introduction contends, that the form of liturgy “wear the idiom, the cadence, the world-view, the imagery” of Christians in the present generation.21 Because debates about Anglican liturgy are always connected to questions of Anglican identity, the perspectives and projects of the Canadian Anglican branch of the liturgical movement were the subject of enormous debate. Many Canadian Anglicans challenged the modernization of liturgy on the grounds that it corroded Anglican tradition, modern prose was too banal to evoke a sense of God’s transcendence, accommodating modernity entailed unexamined theological consequences, and personally meaningful devotional patterns of a lifetime were lost. These points were made frequently by conservative Anglicans in the Prayer Book Society, the Anglican Free Press, and elsewhere (chapter 4).

Social Service Since Jesus walked in Palestine his followers have cared for the poor, the sick, and the marginalized. Premodern Anglicans were no exception. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the early modern period, the Church of England ministered to the poor, fed and clothed the destitute, and cared for the sick. But from the point of view of modernity, such interventions were purely casework. Modernity ascribed a large part of suffering to the inadequate design and functioning of social and economic systems and asserted that those systems could and should be reengineered. Instead of assisting victims, why not eradicate victimization? Instead of feeding the poor, why not eliminate poverty? Instead of healing the sick, why not address the social conditions that promoted disease? That was the approach of social Christianity (chapter 2).

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anglicans in canada Each denomination had its own way of moving toward social Christianity, and in each denomination there were those who had reasons for resisting it. The Canadian denomination that has been most researched in this respect is the Methodist Church, where the change was particularly dramatic. In the 1890s it was known primarily for revivalism, whereas by the end of World War I it was known primarily for social activism.22 The Anglican experience was not quite the same. Revivalism was on the periphery of nineteenth-century Canadian Anglicanism, and many Victorian Anglicans were conspicuous as political leaders and reformers. No movement was needed to move Anglicans toward a sense of social mission because they never lacked one, simply disagreeing on the particulars (chapter 2). But the challenge of modernity renewed old questions of the social implications of Christian faith and reframed them in the context of current secular thought. What was the best way to make society what God wanted it to be or to shape individuals in the faith and moral life of the Christian community? The Church could hardly compete with a secular culture that thoroughly socialized individuals into the immoral social and economic structures, attitudes, and practices of the age. In that case, should the Church focus on changing society? Was it even possible to engineer a just society? Perhaps it was. World fairs showcased technological progress that could help all humanity. Nuclear physics, biochemistry, genetic engineering, psychology, sociology, and modern administration and business management, none of which had existed as a field of study before the advent of modernity, gave people greater control over nature and society. Legislatures and municipal councils, confident in their abilities to improve the world, mandated fair political processes, effective law enforcement, municipal planning and slum clearance, environmental improvements, public housing, social security, welfare, health insurance, and numerous other modern strategies for justice and humanitarianism. In order to show Anglicans that modernization belonged on the agenda of the Church, advocates needed to offer a theological rationale for it. The key concept by which social Christianity linked doctrine with the project of modernization was the kingdom of God. This named the hope of justice, love, and spiritual and physical well-being that Jesus had preached in his earthly ministry according to the Gospels: the kingdom, not individual religiosity. Social reform and world improvement were not only civic duties but also Christian duties because they helped build the kingdom of God. In the years around World War I, General Synod and many dioceses appointed councils for social service to investigate social problems and recommend solutions to them, including legislation, institutional reforms, and (that favorite) better education (chapter 2). But modernity had its coldhearted side, too, for sometimes the things social engineers wanted to fix were dear to ordinary people—such as their gonads. In Alberta, many Anglicans supported the provincial government in its modern approach to the problem of mental illness.

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questions about the church in the modern world Instead of treating those who were ill, why not prevent the disease from being inherited? The government sterilized 2,822 alleged “mental defectives” between 1928 and 1972. In the 1990s, the provincial government paid reparations to the survivors. Similarly, Anglican programs to force First Nations people to abandon the “show and trappings of ancient custom” and herd them into a “new era” (Document 6) were almost always directed by modernizing, scientifically minded, liberal social Christians. So in the area of Christian social service, modernity raised questions for Anglicans. One response was to embrace modernity on the grounds that its insights and techniques finally made it possible to realize the kingdom of God on earth. Another response was to repudiate it on the grounds that it elevated social utility above the “infinite worth of the individual human soul.” Sometimes advocates and opponents of modernity squared off. Sometimes, though, the same people took both sides of the case at the same time. In its first triennial report in 1918 the CSS at some points applauded modern insights and techniques that could help Canadians build a better society but at other points argued that modernity was built on certain principles entirely hostile to the Gospel, of which it named individualism, competition, and materialism.23 Canadian Anglicanism was never of one mind on modernity, but it agreed that the ancient issues that modernity raised in its own ways required debate.

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Education During the heyday of quarreling over Church style (chapter 4), Anglican Sunday school materials were either evangelical or high-church. Evangelical parishes bought their materials from the Canadian Church Sunday School Institute, while high-church parishes bought theirs from Church Record Publications. In 1920 the General Board of Religious Education of General Synod purchased the stock, debt, and good will of the two companies and combined their work into a single production, “Christian Truth and Life.” The new series successfully evaded the touchy issues of Church style but paid the cost of a bland content, patronizing tone, and old-fashioned pedagogy. It aimed to make children learn the essentials of Christian doctrine and morality as their elders presented them. Children memorized lessons. They did not ask questions. They sat for examinations. The materials interwove biblical literalism with “a good deal of nostalgia for Victorian England, with illustrations showing girls in petticoats with thatched cottages in the background.”24 In 1958 and 1959 a serendipitous combination of death, resignation, and planned restructuring gave Howard Clark, then the chair of the GBRE executive committee and about to become primate of the Anglican Church, the opportunity to let in some fresh air. For the influential office of general secretary, he nominated a liberal young Trinity College graduate from the diocese of Niagara, Michael Creal. Appointments as editorial secretaries went to another young liberal,

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anglicans in canada Philip Jefferson, and the somewhat older and more ultra-liberal Ernest Harrison, later deprived by the bishop of Toronto of his license to officiate as a priest. Creal, Jefferson, and Harrison decided that the “Christian Truth and Life” series was outdated beyond the possibility of revision. It was time to modernize. They abruptly dispensed with the services of women and men who had been loyally writing lessons for years and began designing a “new curriculum.” Its principles (Document 38) were approved at General Synod in 1962. The modernized GBRE embraced the new education theory propounded by the thoroughly modern American pragmatist John Dewey (1859–1952), who in an influential 1938 work conceived of education as the “intelligently directed development of the possibilities inherent in ordinary experience” and not the transmission of a heritage.25 They held that educators should not teach a classical canon of core knowledge but respond with trained psychological awareness to the experience of their students. Accordingly, teachers were encouraged to participate not only in special training events but also, if at all possible, in emotionally exhausting, two-week “group life labs” in interpersonal relationships, events just then coming into vogue. Liberalized study materials were adapted from the Seabury Curriculum of the Episcopal Church, and units began appearing before the 1965 General Synod. The GBRE staff was astonished to discover widespread resistance. They concluded with dismay that clergy and Sunday school teachers were more illtrained in education and more unattuned to modern ways of thinking than they had imagined. Parish clergy and teachers, for their part, were surprised that the bureaucrats at Church headquarters were so out of touch with the grass roots of the Church—or at least the Church outside urban southern Ontario. The most frequent complaints were that the new curriculum stressed form and technique over content and could only be taught by those trained in modern educational theory. As George Luxton, the bishop of Huron and one of the most outspoken critics of the modernized GBRE, evaluated the experiment: “The new curriculum, with its somewhat hesitant attitude about faith and doctrine, with its oblique reference to and use of the bible, and with its incorporation of the newer, open-ended method of teaching, disturbed and puzzled our teachers; and many of them were frightened out of their calling. . . . We have modernized our official Anglican Curriculum to the extent that it no longer meets our local needs, nor does it contribute any longer to the unity of our National Church.”26 Relatively few parishes adopted the new curriculum, and after 1969, when the department of religious education disappeared in the PriceWaterhouse restructuring of General Synod, the vision of a national Anglican curriculum died. The best-known Anglican publication of the 1960s was Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew, commissioned by Creal and his staff and then recommended by them as the official Lenten reading for the Anglican Church of Canada in 1965. Berton, a journalist, popularizing historian, and television celebrity, had no use

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questions about the church in the modern world for the Anglican Church, and he boasted that he had not set foot in one for twenty years. To write the book, he hired a researcher to visit some Anglican churches for him and report back. Many Anglicans were surprised that their 1965 Lenten devotions were being led by a self-proclaimed atheist, but the GBRE explained that dialog between the Church and the modern world was a valuable thing and would be very much enhanced if Anglicans listened to what Berton found wrong with them. Contacted by an Anglican writer twenty-five years after The Comfortable Pew, Berton said, “I haven’t been inside a church since, not even for a wedding. I think it would be hypocritical of me to go into one since I’m not a Christian, don’t believe in it, don’t believe in all the mumbo-jumbo, or the supernatural aspect of it. I think it’s nonsense. . . . I think it’s irrelevant to modern times.”27

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The Passing of Modernity Throughout the twentieth century a great many scholars, thinkers, and writers critiqued modernity. It is risky to name a few without naming hundreds, but some of the most trenchant criticism came from Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr in theology, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim in sociology, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre in philosophy, and Albert Camus in literature. Many Canadians in the Anglican orbit, even at the peak of the Church’s accommodation to modernity, joined in cautioning that modernity no less than premodernity posed theological, moral, and practical problems. Lesslie Newbigin (1909–98), a bishop of the Church of South India who had become director of the division of world mission of the World Council of Churches, was invited to Toronto in 1965 to address a two-day seminar on mission chaired by the primate. “Missions,” Newbigin warned, “like every other form of human activity, are always tempted to be conformed to this world. We find it easy at this date to detect in our predecessors a tendency to be conformed to the pattern of colonialism. Our temptation is to be conformed to the pattern which is popular now in the affluent societies of the West—material and technical aid, without long term commitment and without religious implications.”28 Another dissenting voice was Charles Davis (b. 1923), then a professor at the University of Alberta and soon afterward a theologian at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. He was, it is true, a Roman Catholic, but he was soon to become a parishioner at the Anglican cathedral in Montreal. Known as a progressive Catholic and a champion of Vatican II, he was, however, unimpressed with mere trendiness. In the scholarly journal Studia Liturgica in 1970 Davis wrote: To make the modern the criterion of ultimate truth or validity has been the mistake of much liberal theology, a mistake in my opinion perpetuated by some so-called radical theologians today. Liberals and radicals are anxious to

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anglicans in canada relativize the past and refuse any absolute authority to the traditional. But they overlook the need to relativize the present as well. That is why the history of liberal theology is littered with antiquated theories once advocated as le dernier cri. . . . But let it be clear at the outset that “modern” and “out of date” are not equivalent to “true” and “false”—at least not for a critical intelligence.29

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Reginald Bibby (b. 1943), a sociologist at the University of Lethbridge who had conducted a survey for the diocese of Toronto in 1985, warned in several books that religious organizations that accommodated modernity might be defeating their purposes. Influenced by Peter Berger among others, he suggested that modern societies, unlike primitive societies that were integrated by homogeneity, were characterized by “a high degree of institutional specialization” that gave people choices and turned them into consumers. In primitive societies, religion offered an integrated vision for the whole of life, whereas a modernized religion specialized in spirituality and let people pick and choose from its teachings, activities, and commitments. “When religion becomes nothing more than a consumer item,” he observed, “the customer is in charge. The gods, relegated to an à la carte role, have little to say about everyday life. In Canada, the stability of religious affiliation is matched by the poverty of religious significance.”30 About the same time, Lewis Garnsworthy (1922–90), the bishop of Toronto who made a career of questioning emperor’s wardrobes, criticized the pretensions of modern planners and managers. “Twelve years ago we did a survey of East Toronto,” he told the synod of the ecclesiastical Province of Ontario in 1985. “It was to tell us how to move in the next dozen years and I picked it up the other day and I looked at the recommendations in it, and if we had done what that survey said twelve years ago we would have made a mistake in almost everything we did. There isn’t any such thing as long-term planning. . . . We are like Abraham who had to go out in faith into a strange country.”31

Conclusion In every age the Church has asked what it means, as a community of Christians in a particular historical culture, to be in the world but not of it. Some have preferred to preserve the beliefs and practices they have received, often unaware that these have been shaped in other historical cultures no more intrinsically Christian than their own. Others have preferred to reshape their beliefs and practices according to new knowledge, often not fully acknowledging that the new knowledge comes without guarantees and is itself a passing chapter in human history. In each generation the spectrum of Anglican opinion about the proper relation between Christ and culture probably changes rather little; what changes is the culture. The historian who focuses on the pronouncements and decisions of leaders, however, may suppose that Victorian Anglicans resisted the ideals of their

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questions about the church in the modern world culture while twentieth-century Anglicans embraced them. That perception results from the circumstance that Church leadership until the 1870s was heavy with anglophile high-church bishops and archdeacons, whereas during the twentieth century it was weighted toward professionals, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs who sat on diocesan executive committees or were hired as consultants and were trained to be impressed by technology, efficient management, scientific proof, and theories for improving the world. Homemakers, persons of color, indigenous people, country folk, and others who were likely to be the victims rather than the managers of modernizing projects were almost entirely excluded from Anglican decision making until the 1970s. As the twenty-first century dawned, some detected another culture—that of postmodernity. Confidence in empirical verifiability was being undermined by scientific theory itself, such as quantum mechanics. Confidence in the rational planning of modern management theory was being shaken by complexity theory. Predictions that religion was dead were being belied by an apparent explosion of interest in human spirituality and the unknown. Should the Church accommodate itself to postmodernity, repudiate it, ignore it, or challenge it? The questions that had confronted Anglicans throughout the generations were still pertinent. What was it to be in the world but not of it? Anglicans had the same questions to ask, the same range of answers from which to choose, and the same ways of carrying on a discussion.

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Notes 1. The list is based on David Lyon, Postmodernity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994), 24. 2. William Katerberg, Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2001), 37–63. 3. William Rainsford, A Preacher’s Story of His Work (New York: Outlook, 1904); William Rainsford, The Story of a Varied Life: An Autobiography (Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1924); Darren Marks, “William S. Rainsford, Forgotten Founder of Toronto’s Evangelical Anglicans, 1877–1882,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 40 (1998): 57–178; Alan L. Hayes, “The Making of an Evangelical Cathedral,” in Carl Benn et al., The Parish and Cathedral Church of St. James’, Toronto 1797–1997: A Collaborative History, gen. ed. William Cooke (Toronto: Printed for the Cathedral by the University of Toronto Press, 1998), 39–76. 4. G. Abbott-Smith, “Frederick Julius Steen,” in Leaders of the Canadian Church, 3 vols., ed. William Bertal Henney (Toronto: Musson, [1918]-1943), iii, 21–36 (quotation on 34); John Cragg Farthing, Recollections of the Right Reverend John Cragg Farthing, Bishop of Montreal, 1909–1939 (Montreal: N.p., 1945?), 115–17. 5. D. C. Masters, Henry John Cody: An Outstanding Life (Toronto: Dundurn, 1995), quotation on 13. 6. Pius IX, “Syllabus of Errors,” para. 80. There are many editions and translations of papal statements. A convenient Internet source is Papal Encyclicals Online. The “Syllabus of Errors” is at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm (accessed July 15, 2003). 7. John Keble, National Apostasy Considered in a Sermon Preached in St. Mary’s Oxford before

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anglicans in canada His Majesty’s Judges of Assize on Sunday, July 14th, 1833, “centenary edition” (London: A. R. Mobray and New York: Morehouse, 1931). 8. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1972), 2: 104. 9. Charles Gore, The Reconstruction of Belief: Belief in God, Belief in Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Church (1921–24, repr. London: J. Murray, 1951), 889. 10. Hollingworth Tully Kingdon, God Incarnate, “The Bishop Paddock Lectures, 1890” (New York: T. Whittaker, 1890), 34 (first and second quotations), 42 (third quotation). 11. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.2.575, quoted in Ellen T. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29. 12. Thomas C. B. Boon, The Anglican Church from the Bay to the Rockies (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1962), 275–78, 284–86. 13. General Synod Journal (1927): 54 (hereafter GSJ). 14. Ibid., 17. 15. William A. Harshaw, A Transforming Influence: A Biographical Memoir of Archbishop Howard H. Clark (Toronto: Harfolk Press, 1993), 15. 16. GSJ (1962): 352. 17. GSJ (1959): 3. 18. GSJ (1971): 144. 19. “New Ways for Managing the National Functions of the Church,” GSJ (1867): 370–89. 20. Church of England in Canada, General Board of Religious Education, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church According to the Use of the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada, Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David Printed as They Are to Be Sung or Said in Churches and the Form or Manner of Making, Ordaining and Consecrating Bishops Priests and Deacons, 1918 ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, n.d.), vii. 21. GSJ (1980): 51; Anglican Church of Canada, The Book of Alternative Services (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1985), 10. 22. Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971); Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1991); Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1992). See also Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, Lambeth 1870–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 23. GSJ (1918): 320–22. 24. Harshaw, A Transforming Influence, 78. 25. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier Books, 1973), 89. 26. George Luxton, The Unfinished Agenda of Anglicanism (London, Ont.: Bishop Cronyn Foundation and Memorial Fund, 1970), 19–20. 27. Harshaw, Transforming Influence, 97. 28. GSJ (1965): 156–57. 29. Charles Davis, “Ghetto or Desert: Liturgy in a Cultural Dilemma,” Studia Liturgica 7, nos. 2–3 (1970): 10–27, quotation on 13.

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questions about the church in the modern world

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30. Reginald W. Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987). 31. Anglican Church of Canada, Ecclesiastical Province of Ontario, Synod, Journal of Proceedings (1985): pt. 3, pg. 46.

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chapter 6

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Questions about Gender in Anglican Life Throughout most of its history the Anglican Church in Canada in its public character was an overwhelmingly male institution, a point demonstrated by the dominance of men in the first five chapters of this book. With rare exceptions, those who had the authority to speak for the Church and make institutional decisions for it were men: bishops, chancellors, clergy, lay leaders, delegates to synods, members of parish vestries, and, in colonial days, officials of the imperial and colonial governments. Public appearances can be deceiving, however. Congregations of worshipers certainly included women—in fact, probably more women than men. And women were providing leadership or participating in almost every dimension of the work of the Church. Sometimes women ministered or influenced events in ways that were largely hidden at the time and are extremely hard for historians to discover. Sometimes women exercised public roles in the mainstream life of the Church, although in that case, because they were women, their contributions often went unacknowledged or were disparaged. Sometimes women gave leadership in Anglican women’s organizations, which throughout their histories were regarded as not quite part of the Church as such and experienced frequent tensions with the male leadership. Gender roles raised questions in practice, and the theology of gender frequently raised questions in principle. For much of the time disagreement merely simmered, but sometimes disputes came to an open boil—disputes, for instance, about whether men would allow women to serve as missionaries, lay pastors, deaconesses, nuns, members of parish vestries, or members of diocesan synods and General Synod; whether men would acknowledge the right of women to run their own organizations; and whether men would ordain women deacons, priests, and bishops. What, if anything, should differentiate men’s and women’s roles in the Church? Underlying the debates about these topical issues lurked some more broadly theological disagreements about the nature and function of gender itself. And, if

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questions about gender in anglican life there were real differences between men and women, which of them were so by God’s design in creation, which were so by consequence of the Fall, and which were so by social construction? By the late twentieth century, the perennial question of God’s purpose for gender was reframed in the context of new social concerns: Was heterosexual attraction part of God’s purpose in the creation of gender? The ways in which Canadian Anglicans addressed and conducted such questions about gender, and the decisions that emerged from them, have been part of the process of creating, and continuing to create, an Anglican identity.1

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Anglican Women before 1870 The best-known Anglican women before 1840 are those who wrote. Frances Moore Brooke (1724–89), for example, the wife of an Anglican chaplain to the garrison in Quebec City from 1763 to 1768, used her experiences there for History of Emily Montague (1769), usually considered the first English Canadian novel. The independent-minded Anna Murphy Jameson (1794–1860), who spent one rather unpleasant year in Upper Canada before separating from her husband and returning to England, wrote about that experience to fascinating effect in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (1838). Anne Langton (1804–93), who lived on her brother’s farm near Peterborough, Ontario, and worked as a teacher, kept a diary. On December 8, 1839, for example, because the minister was away and the church closed, a congregation of thirty-one neighbors assembled in a home, and, Langton recorded, “I was parson, and took my text from Romans ch. xiv. v. 16.”2 From the 1810s, many women, particularly those who were more well-todo, offered themselves to two recent kinds of Anglican organizations. Sunday schools came to British North America (BNA) after the War of 1812, and some of the teaching staff were women, usually single women and older women. Anglican social benevolent societies such as the Upper Canada Bible and Common Prayer Book Society began about the same time. Over the next several decades women devoted themselves to a number of local women’s missionary societies, bible societies, social relief societies, Dorcas societies (which made clothing for the poor), and parish ladies’ guilds.3 Those developments have not yet been formally studied, and information comes to us piecemeal. The first meeting of the Sewing Society of the parish of St. Mary Magdalene, Picton, Ontario, for example, took place on January 6, 1842. Thirty-four members pooled their skills to raise funds to purchase an organ.4 In 1846, at Dunham, Quebec, a group of women formed the “parochial sewing society,” otherwise known as the “ladies’ society of industry,” which, reportedly, had a men’s auxiliary. Nearby at Abbotsford, the Ladies’ Church Society was in existence in 1850. Many women also took active roles in local temperance societies, which sprung up by the hundreds during the 1830s. In later years there arose the “twenty-minute societies,” a concept imported from England. Members agreed to spend twenty minutes a day, or two hours a week, on church work.5

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anglicans in canada Parish women’s societies sometimes joined together to form citywide or diocesan organizations, also administered by women, as in Ottawa in 1871.6 Some Anglicans, however, questioned whether the Church, of all institutions, should be encouraging women to act with such independence outside the home. A letter to a newspaper in 1827 complained that societies of women were contrary to apostolic precept and calculated to subvert the social order.7 Women also beautified their parish churches by embroidering altar cloths, laying carpets, upholstering pews, and donating stained-glass windows. In 1833 at St. Peter’s, Cobourg, Upper Canada, for example, women of the parish were making and arranging crimson hangings for the pulpit.8 In this way Canadian women often “brought a strongly feminine and even domestic emphasis into the churches.”9

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Anglican Women’s Organizations after 1870 During the 1870s, women’s organizations for furthering the Church’s work in the world gathered considerable momentum at the local, regional, and national levels in the Anglican Church as in other communions. They can be categorized according to their three main objectives: education, community service, and missions. In 1886 a leading member of a women’s organization in Ottawa invited an audience to imagine the world without the young women who volunteered in Sunday and day schools or for mission bands, sewing societies, church social planning committees, and other groups. “Do you ever think,” she asked, “what a blank there would be?”10 A chief reason for the burgeoning of women’s organizations in the 1870s is that women were eager to support the mission movement that was so capturing the imagination of Canadians. Parish sewing circles and gleaning societies (“gathering laboriously trifling sums”) supported domestic missions and bursaries for theological students. Organizations at the diocesan level followed. One that began in 1873 carried an elegant title: the “Diocese of Montreal Ladies’ Association in Aid of Church Missions (Under the Direction of the Bishop),” the parenthetical phrase apparently having been included to reassure a wary diocesan. Similar groups included the Churchwoman’s Missionary Association of Halifax (1870), the Women’s Missionary Union of Lennoxville (1877), and the Church Woman’s Mission Aid Society in the diocese of Toronto (1879).11

The Women’s Auxiliary The most important and enduring of the women’s organizations, and therefore the one that proved most generally threatening to the men of the Church and raised the most controversy, was the Women’s Auxiliary.12 Originally the society to which it was an auxiliary was the Domestic and Foreign Mission Society

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questions about gender in anglican life (DFMS), which the provincial synod of Canada created in 1883 (chapter 1). When the board of management of the DFMS met in Ottawa during the following provincial synod in April 1885, a delegation of women attended and offered to develop a women’s auxiliary. The delegation was led by Roberta Elizabeth (Odell) Tilton (1837–1925), who had been inspired by an organization of the same name and purpose in the Episcopal Church in the United States, just as the Canadian DFMS had been inspired by an Episcopal society of the same name and purpose. Tilton’s address, and the resolution of the DFMS authorizing a Women’s Auxiliary, is reprinted as Document 39. She and her colleagues wrote a constitution (modeled on that of the American auxiliary) and invited the wives of bishops to serve as honorary presidents, a predictable technique for gaining status and respectability. The Women’s Auxiliary grew at an extraordinary pace. Within ten years it had almost five hundred branches across the ecclesiastical Province of Canada. Canadian Anglicans did not welcome the prospect of a strong and independent women’s organization with universal warmth. When the bishops received letters asking that they appoint women to organize diocesan branches of the Women’s Auxiliary, some did not trouble to reply. Tensions increased as some diocesan auxiliary boards, and in 1890 the provincial board itself, claimed authority to decide how their funds should be spent. As Mrs. Willoughby Cummings, a long-time officer of the Women’s Auxiliary, recalled in a history of the organization that she wrote in 1928, the men on the DFMS board wanted women to collect money from house to house and then remit the entire proceeds, undesignated, to them.13 The women were defiant. They insisted on developing their own educational and other programs; sponsoring missions of their own choice; recruiting, sponsoring, and assisting the training of their own missionaries; sponsoring their own fact-finding tours of missions; adopting their own organizational policies; making their own regulations for their missionaries and candidates; producing their own prayer-cycle booklets; and publishing their own popular newsletter, the Letter Leaflet (which excerpted letters from missionaries). Cummings recalled that men of the DFMS would remark, “The W.A. do work hard, but they are no real Auxiliary to us.”14 At each of its triennial meetings the Women’s Auxiliary could expect a letter from the bishops, urging them to give up their independent activities, focus on fund-raising, and surrender control of their budget to the men. The auxiliary’s board resented the paternalism and in 1898 recorded a vote to give up being an “auxiliary” in favor of becoming an independent women’s missionary organization. After cool reconsideration, however, the board rescinded the resolution before the end of the session. If the men of the DFMS wanted to control the Women’s Auxiliary at the level of the ecclesiastical province, the men of the dioceses and parishes wanted to control them at their level as well. In 1895 the male church wardens of St. John’s

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anglicans in canada Church, Thorold, Ontario, persuaded the parish branch of the auxiliary to organize a strawberry social for the congregation, not because it was mission work but because it was the sort of thing women were expected to do. The president of the auxiliary branch was so incensed that she threatened to resign. Members then passed a resolution: “Having considered more carefully the Constitution of the Woman’s Auxiliary we feel that entertainments are more within the province of the Musical and Literary Society and beg leave to transfer the management of the Strawberry Festival to that body.” Friction of this kind was widespread. The bishop of Niagara in 1895 reported a “feeling which has possession of some of the clergy that Parochial and Diocesan interests are suffering because the energies of the women in this Diocese are largely absorbed by the W.A. in their devotion to Domestic and Foreign Missions.”15 Husbands also sometimes resented wives’ fervent attention to ministries outside the home. It was common among Canadian Anglican leaders to believe that women who felt called to recognized Church ministries and leadership should remain unmarried. In 1902, as the DFMS was being dissolved and the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC) created (chapter 1), women found it by no means easy to make a deliberate decision to retain a subordinate and auxiliary status. Many thought the time had come to become a women’s mission society instead. The decision of the Women’s Auxiliary board meeting of 1902 in favor of the auxiliary status was swayed by the pleas of a succession of male deputations from the DFMS, the MSCC, the Province of Rupert’s Land, and British Columbia. The MSCC appears to have been almost as unsatisfactory a partner as the DFMS until Sydney H. Gould became secretary in 1911. One of the first tasks he set himself was the healing of the relationship between the MSCC and the Women’s Auxiliary. The result was a new and clear agreement expressed in an “Aim and Plan” (Document 40). The auxiliary would be allowed to identify specific responsibilities for Canadian Anglican missions, and the MSCC would surrender claims of control in those areas. In order to coordinate the two organizations, the auxiliary began to elect delegates to the board of the MSCC in 1912. By 1918 the Dominion Women’s Auxiliary was responsible for twenty-nine missions, twenty-one missionaries in Canada, two “bible women” overseas, and grants in support of thirty other workers. Diocesan and parish branches supported many additional missions and missionaries. In 1920 the auxiliary created an annual “Women’s Day of Prayer.” In 1922 its Letter Leaflet was transformed into the more ambitious and more broadly conceived Living Message. A subscription cost 50 cents a year for twelve issues, and the magazine turned a profit. During the 1920s several diocesan Women’s Auxiliary boards assumed responsibility for ministries of social service, and in 1931 the Dominion Board did so as well. At that point, a list of auxiliary activities might have included supervising about forty missionaries in Canada and thirty overseas; managing homes for the aged and

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questions about gender in anglican life homes for the poor; publishing study books and periodicals; producing educational visual aids; programming conferences and retreats; running groups for women, senior girls, junior girls, and junior boys; meeting the needs of people and communities in crisis; setting up and staffing nursery schools; providing food and companionship to the elderly and shut-ins; assisting and visiting in hospitals, nursing homes, and mental health facilities; planning worship for the Women’s Day of Prayer and other occasions; sewing and knitting clothing for children in residential schools; sending relief parcels to drought-stricken areas on the prairies; sending food and toys to children in remote missions; raising funds; administering a large and complicated organization; training new leaders; and sustaining an immense volume of correspondence. In virtually all dimensions of the Church’s life save the sacraments, the work of the Women’s Auxiliary paralleled the work of men in General Synod and on its boards. Men asked a facetious but sneering question: “Why don’t the ladies join the Church?” Recognizing that it had become much more than an auxiliary to a mission society, the Women’s Auxiliary decided in 1946 to change its name to the Women’s Auxiliary of the Church of England in Canada, although the ambiguity in its essential identity continued to haunt it well into the 1950s. In Newfoundland, the counterpart to the Women’s Auxiliary was the Church of England Women’s Association (CEWA), founded in 1876 by George Gardner, an Anglican priest who was also a Freemason. He constituted the CEWA on the Masonic pattern, with secret rituals and hand signals, passwords, and degrees of membership. In 1959 the practice of using a password was finally discontinued by order of the bishop, who said that the members’ true password was “on their foreheads given them at baptism.” A number of puzzled women asked, “How are we to know that persons attending our meetings belong to the Association?”16 The CEWA raised money to be disbursed by the men of the Church, cleaned churches, visited the sick, distributed clothing, and supported an orphanage in St. John’s and a children’s hospital in Pangnirtung on Baffin Island. A diocesan council was formed in 1926. In 1969 the various women’s organizations were joined into a single women’s organization for Newfoundland, the Anglican Church Women’s Association.

Other Women’s Organizations Although the Women’s Auxiliary was the principal arena for the ministry of Anglican women in Canada, they also served in many other areas outside the male-dominated structures of the public Church. In the nineteenth century, when the auxiliary still eschewed social-service work and was concentrating on missions, women who wanted to reform their communities often gravitated to temperance organizations. Many, including a number who had their own unhappy personal experiences of alcoholic parents and family dysfunction, were drawn first of all to what contemporaries called “rescue work.” From there they

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anglicans in canada saw the need for preventative work, which meant seeking to stunt the growth of social problems through education and job training, social reform, religious conversion, gymnasium exercise, “friendly letters,” and legislation. From their concern for legislation they worked to promote female suffrage. Married Anglican women who were enthusiastic for social and moral reform were very likely to join the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union; those who were single joined the Young Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (YWCTU). One particularly noted temperance worker, Bertha Wright, was a sometime Anglican connected with St. James’s and St. George’s churches in Ottawa and later a Presbyterian. She was twenty-seven in 1890 when she and other members of the local YWCTU found themselves engulfed in a religious riot in Hull, Quebec. They were leading a temperance meeting that featured speakers and singers when a crowd of two hundred men “well primed with liquor” and headed by the keeper of an unlicensed saloon in town, according to the Ottawa Citizen, rushed through the doors, throwing “missiles” and raining blows. Undaunted, Wright returned six days later and caused another riot. She also founded and managed a “Home for Friendless Women” that sheltered unwed mothers, orphans, and the destitute elderly. Her early feminism has won the admiration of women’s historians, who tolerate the archaic Christian convictions that motivated her.17 Aside from the Women’s Auxiliary, few Anglican women’s organizations were organized nationally. One, the Mothers’ Union, was imported from England in 1888 and began to develop nationally after 1903, forming a Dominion council in 1925. It was committed “to uphold the sanctity of marriage; to awaken in all mothers a sense of their great responsibility in the training of their boys and girls. . . ; to organize in every place a band of mothers who will unite in prayer and seek by their own example to lead their families in purity and holiness of life.”18 The Mothers’ Union restricted membership to married women; those who were single could be associates, and divorced women were excluded altogether until 1968. The Girls’ Friendly Society, organized in Canada in 1882, was an Anglican counterpart to the Protestant ecumenical YWCA. It administered social programs and shelters for single working women and met young women immigrants at the ships.19

Women Religious Tractarianism stimulated a creative rethinking of Anglican tradition. One of its many contributions was the revival of religious orders for women and men. Tractarians “set a Catholic value upon celibate life and looked to Catholic models as guides to sanctity,” and during the 1840s women in England were beginning to take vows and organize sisterhoods.20 During the early 1870s, a few Canadian Anglicans attempted to found a sisterhood in Toronto, but they were unsuccessful.21

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questions about gender in anglican life The first permanent Canadian Anglican religious order was the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine (SSJD), which was founded in Toronto in 1884 and 1885. The mother foundress, Hannah Grier Coome (1837–1921), was a member of the Anglican elite in Ontario. Through her mother she was of United Empire Loyalist stock, descended from the Boultons and the Gambles, members of the Family Compact of Upper Canada. Her father was rector of St. Thomas, Belleville, by the appointment of the Crown. In 1859 she married a young British engineer who was working for the Grand Trunk Railway in Belleville. Moving with him to England, she came to be involved with the Sisters of St. Mary the Virgin, Wantage, in London. A victim of poor medical care, she lost her only child in childbirth and spent five years as an invalid; her husband died of cancer in 1878. She then decided to enter the Wantage sisterhood, but another development diverted her. In 1881 a Cowley Father from Boston leading a parish mission at St. Thomas, Toronto, inspired a group of people—including Coome’s sister, the principal of the Bishop Strachan School for girls—to organize a Canadian sisterhood. The group persuaded Coome to be the founder and then formed an all-male governing committee. In June 1882 she entered the Sisterhood of St. Mary in Peekskill, New York. After her profession in September 1884, she returned to Toronto to found the SSJD, the rule of which (Document 41) was almost the same as that of the Peekskill house, and that, in turn, was derived from the Order of St. Benedict. The bishop of Toronto opened the house in 1885. The sisters moved to a new house in 1889 and to their present location in Willowdale (now part of Toronto) in 1953. The ministries for which the SSJD have been best known are St. John’s Convalescent Hospital, Willowdale, opened in 1937, and a home for the elderly in L’Amoreaux (also within the present limits of the city of Toronto), opened in 1978. Over the course of their history they have also administered numerous other hospitals, schools, homes for the elderly, missions to the poor, shelters for women, Sunday School by Post, care for the mentally handicapped, branch houses, and other ministries across Canada and in New York state.22 The second important Anglican religious order for women, the Sisters of the Church, was started in 1863 in England by Emily Ayckbowm, a clergy daughter in Chester. It originated as an association to help the poor and run ragged Sunday schools (“ragged” meaning that the poor were not charged fees). In the 1870s it developed into a religious community with a convent, rule, habit, and liturgical discipline. It began work in Toronto in 1891, but until 1923 Canadian women who wanted to join the order were required to spend their novitiate at the mother house in England. The Sisters of the Church served variously as teachers, medical professionals, and social workers and were also known for their liturgical crafts, particularly embroidery. The order is now very small but continues to operate.23 In 1884 in Yale, British Columbia, then a wide-open railroad and gold rush

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anglicans in canada town, three English sisters of the Order of All Hallows opened a boarding school for white and Indian girls. White society put little value on well-educated Indian girls, and funding eventually dried up. The sisters returned home in 1920. An evaluation of sisterhoods by a historian of women in the Episcopal Church is likely applicable to the Canadian situation: “The sisterhoods played a transitional role. Very few of the Church’s women became nuns; a few more took on the commitment of being lay sisters or associates to the orders. But the sisters’ ministries authenticated similar ministries for laywomen, [and] made a career in ‘Church work’ a possibility for a later generation of women.”24

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Deaconesses Religious orders for women were supported by Anglicans of a more catholic persuasion; those of a more evangelical bent often attacked them fiercely for the same reasons that Luther had disliked monasteries in the sixteenth century. Evangelicals hoped to render orders unnecessary by offering women an alternative ministry—the ministry of deaconess.25 Deaconesses served as Christian social workers, medical workers, counselors, and teachers; in Canada, they were set apart by a bishop with the laying on of hands. The office of deaconess had been created, or revived, in the Church of England in 1861. The provincial synod of Canada in 1886 made provisional peace between catholic Anglicans who wanted sisterhoods and evangelical Anglicans who wanted deaconesses by legitimizing both ministries in any diocese where a bishop gave permission. At first Canadian women who wanted training as deaconesses had to go to an institute connected with Grace Church, New York, or to the Mildmay Deaconess House in London, England. In 1891 the Wycliffe College Alumni Association appointed a committee for a Canadian training school. The committee investigated the situation in England, brought the bishop of Toronto on board, raised funds, and opened the Church of England Deaconess and Missionary Training House in Toronto in August 1893. The first “head deaconess” of the training house was Sybil Wilson, the daughter of Sir Daniel Wilson, president of the University of Toronto and a founder of Wycliffe. Before her new school opened she spent a year at Mildmay to see how things were done there. Deaconess candidates studied theology at Wycliffe, spent three or four months in local hospitals in practical nursing, and took internships in churches in the poorer neighborhoods of downtown Toronto. After World War II the “Deac House” was reconceived. It was disconnected from the evangelical wing of the Church and renamed—unofficially at first, officially later—the Anglican Women’s Training College (AWTC). Students could now choose to take their theological courses at either Trinity or Wycliffe colleges. Between 1895, when the first graduates were made deaconesses in Toronto, and 1969, when AWTC merged with a somewhat similar United Church of Canada institution, the school graduated about five hundred woman church workers.

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questions about gender in anglican life Deaconesses were typically recruited for urban and town parishes and for churches in Labrador or Moosonee, or the North West, or other remote parts of Canada that could not find or afford an ordained man. They also served in churches overseas, Indian residential schools, Church-affiliated residences for women and girls, hospitals and medical facilities, and diocesan institutions. Deaconesses in parishes typically cared for the poor, the sick, and those in prison; taught children; led groups of teen-aged girls; visited shut-ins; led bible study groups for women and mothers’ meetings; evangelized; provided health care; and promoted the Church’s mission work. Until the 1950s it was rare for a deaconess to participate in the Sunday liturgy or preach. Until the 1960s deaconesses wore uniforms: a green shirtwaist dress, ankle length, with a white celluloid clerical collar and cuffs and a matching bonnet. Deaconesses’ ministries were universally seen as different from, and inferior to, the ministries of ordained men. Compared to male clergy, deaconesses were by far less readily employable, less well remunerated, less secure in their appointments, and less supported in their retirement. One sign of their lower institutional status was that the Church did not feel moved to come to a common understanding about their status or ministry. Were they “ordained” or “set apart”? Were they like male deacons or different? Could they cease being deaconesses, or were they ordained for life, as male deacons were? Were they “clergy” for the purposes of canon law and pensions? What authority did they have? Who appointed them? Who paid them? For most of these questions there were different answers in different dioceses at different times; even within dioceses, there might be different answers for different deaconesses. It was not until 1921 that the persistent confusion about deaconesses first penetrated the awareness of General Synod, and then not because it had heard the voices of the deaconesses themselves but because the Lambeth Conference of bishops of the Anglican communion had referred the issue to the provinces for consideration. In 1920 a committee of the Lambeth Conference on the “position of women in the councils and ministrations of the Church” called attention to a “large measure of uncertainty” regarding the “status of a Deaconess and . . . the conditions under which she exercises her functions.” It urged that the diaconate for women “should be canonically and formally recognized in the several Provinces,” as it already had been in the Episcopal Church.26 Thus prodded, General Synod in 1921 passed the canon on deaconesses (Document 42). Later in 1921, the House of Bishops approved a rite for the making of deaconesses. The Lambeth committee believed that a woman’s admission to the ministry of deaconess conferred Holy Orders on her. The Anglican Church in Canada did not accept that view, and indeed Lambeth itself in 1930 changed its mind. Some bishops understood deaconesses as clergy, some did not. In Saskatchewan in 1922, George Exton Lloyd, who might not be without faults of other kinds, proved to be a strong and consistent supporter of the ministry of women. When Deaconess Mabel Jones came to his diocese, he scrutinized the service for the

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anglicans in canada making of deaconesses, her letters of order, and her license to exercise ministry and decreed that they “constituted her clergy.” Accordingly, he unilaterally gave her a seat on the floor of his diocesan synod.27 Almost by definition, deaconesses spent their time with the socially marginal. Therefore, as soon as churches with tight budgets were forced to assess priorities they usually determined that the ministry of deaconesses was relatively dispensable. In 1903, for example, Bishop Cronyn Memorial Church in London, Ontario, decided that it would be financially wise to get rid of its deaconess and hire someone to do bookkeeping and stenography instead. During World War I, the deaconess at All Saints, Windsor, was about to be laid off until the social service club went fund-raising for her salary. As governments began assuming more and more responsibility for social welfare during the 1940s, churches had even less reason to maintain deaconesses. They also faced frustrations as victims of gender stereotyping. A deaconess became director of leadership training in the diocese of Moosonee in 1957 but found her effectiveness limited by some priests’ assumptions that a woman could not do that job even though, in fact, a woman was doing it.

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Missionaries Missionaries were the third major group of institutionally recognized Anglican woman church workers in the nineteenth century. Originally, the D&FMS refused to sponsor any woman missionaries at all except for those married to male missionaries. It therefore fell to the Women’s Auxiliary to sponsor them. The auxiliary of the diocese of Toronto sent a Miss Brown to Blackfoot Crossing east of Calgary in 1887, and the Dominion Women’s Auxiliary sent a Miss Sherlock to Japan in 1891, fully paying her travel, salary, and outfit.28 In the three main overseas fields sponsored by the MSCC, one missionary was Florence Haslam (1908–2001), who in 1934, after taking an M.D. at the University of Toronto, took charge of the Maple Leaf Hospital, which her parents had started in Kangra, India. Over the next forty years she treated thousands and was inducted into the Order of Canada in 1974. In Japan, Canadian women missionaries launched one of that country’s premier nursing schools. Women were also sent to numerous other foreign fields, including Fukien in China, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, and Antigua. During World War II, several Women’s Auxiliary missionaries ministered in the evacuation camps where Japanese Canadians were interned.

Women in Pioneer Ministry Between about 1900 and 1930, in the heyday of western Canadian settlement, a number of women exercised bold and sometimes strikingly creative ministries

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questions about gender in anglican life in pioneering situations. Perhaps so many of these ministries fell to women because, as people often said at the time, bishops could not find many men willing to work in remote outposts in harsh climates and for thin remuneration and were, therefore, forced to rely on women. Or perhaps the ministry of women was more readily accepted in a part of Canada that had never known the trappings of Church establishment.

The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf (FML), which George Exton Lloyd founded in 1917 (or, rather, which he reorganized from an earlier venture launched by his sister in 1903) was intended to support the ministry of Anglican women. The FML specialized in sending young English women to western Canada as teachers. Its slogan, “Keep Canada British and Christian,” grates on our ears like fingernails on a blackboard, but it expressed a prevalent type of contemporary Anglicanism. During the 1920s the supply of Canadian teachers increased, and the work of the FML declined.29

Sunday School by Post Sunday School by Post was conceived by a Mrs. Gwynne in Grenfell, Saskatchewan, in 1905. George Exton Lloyd, again, pushed the movement forward, and it spread quickly throughout the western dioceses. Thousands and thousands of students in outlying areas received their Sunday school lessons in the mail and sent examinations in return. Most of the program’s administrators were women.

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The Sunday School Caravan A third, and particularly romantic, venture won fame far beyond the boundaries of Canada. The Sunday school caravan movement was begun by a tough and stubborn English woman named Frances Hatton Eva Hasell (1886–1974).30 She had been born to a manor in Cumberland, England, and money was never an object for her. As a child, she received tutoring from governesses, read the classics, traveled, rode horseback, played tennis, attended church regularly, and began teaching Sunday school at the age of eleven. She became aware of the needs of ministry in Canada when she raised funds in her diocese for the Archbishops’ Western Canada Fund (chapter 1). Asked to serve as a diocesan Sunday school organizer, Hasell began studying at a theological school, St. Christopher’s, Blackheath, which specialized in training Anglican women for educational ministries. There she made friends who told her of the spiritual and pastoral needs of British emigrants to the prairies of Canada. World War I intervened, and she served as a nurse, drove an ambulance, and learned about automobile repair. Meanwhile, some of her

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anglicans in canada friends from college, working in the diocese of Qu’Appelle, persuaded her that a woman who had Christian convictions, energy, and a knowledge of automobile mechanics might be just the person to teach Christianity to isolated homesteaders. Hasell was enthusiastic. She made contact with some of the officials of the national Church and diocese, arranged the necessary permissions, and in the summer of 1920 found her way to Winnipeg. There she bought a Ford caravan, painted it black, and emblazoned the legend “Sunday School Mission, Anglican Church” in red and gold. Then Hasell drove to Regina and spent the summer in the diocese of Qu’Appelle, visiting a succession of outposts for perhaps a week each. She gave lessons in the Bible and the prayer book, delivered public lectures, donated religious literature, led shortened versions of morning and evening prayer, and, principally, formed Sunday schools. She would also take over those that already existed, running them for a week for the edification of the locals. At the end of the summer she donated the caravan to the Church and returned to England, where she went on deputation and raised funds for her project. She recruited women—always women, never men—to join her work, selecting them carefully and training them. “There seems to be,” her biographer observes, “no known reason for her inflexible attitude in this matter, although it is possible that, in a male-dominated society, she feared eventual loss of control if men were allowed into the organization.”31 Hasell’s important discovery was that many independent young and middle-aged English women were, like herself, very willing to renounce the comforts of home and pay their own ways to Canada for the privilege of serving God in some of the most challenging of conditions. It was a matter of discipleship and service and spiritual growth. She returned to Canada summer after summer from 1922 to 1970, working throughout the prairie provinces and British Columbia. The work peaked between 1955 and 1959, when she had sixty-two vanners working in fifteen dioceses. For most of these years her close and constant companion was her friend Iris Sayle (1894–1973). By 1924 the General Board of Religious Education (GBRE) was sufficiently distraught with the untidiness of Hasell’s unsupervised ministry that it created the Van Committee to try to oversee her. There was friction. Robert Hiltz, secretary of the GBRE, preferred finding Canadian money and Canadian workers; Hasell preferred British money and British workers. Hiltz wanted control; Hasell wanted control. Apart from the fact that Hasell was strong-willed, she was, after all, the one with the money. In 1929 she declared that she would no longer work with the Van Committee. That was the end of the matter. Her work would be easy to caricature. A short, stout, no-nonsense, wealthy British woman dressed in a khaki shirt jacket, brown coat, and ankle-high boots, there she was, descending each summer on outposts in the Canadian wilderness, armed with Nelson’s Bible wall pictures and magic lantern slides, notebooks and pencils, and chalk and plasticine. She led hymns, taught moralistic

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questions about gender in anglican life lessons about unselfishness and self-sacrifice and prayer based on the example of the Lord, promoted British patriotism, and declaimed against communism. In most of these respects she was a typical Canadian Anglican leader of the day, apart from the fact that she was a woman who could outmaneuver men. By the 1960s her work seemed dated, and she was growing tired. Decline set in. She blamed the unappreciative younger clergy. Hasell relinquished control in 1973, and, with a new vision, General Synod launched the Western Canada Sunday School Caravan Fund in 1974.

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The Bishop’s Messengers A fourth important venture in women’s ministry in the early twentieth century was the Bishop’s Messengers, founded in 1929 by Marguerita Fowler.32 Fowler had nursed her parents in England until they died, and then, in a church in Winnipeg while visiting family and friends in 1926, she felt that God was showing her something to do: a pioneer ministry in western Canada. She consulted with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and began attending St. Christopher’s College, Blackheath. There she made the acquaintance of Eva Hasell, who put her in touch with the bishop of Brandon. The bishop saw work for her among the homesteads in northern Manitoba and suggested that she settle in Swan River, four hundred kilometers north of Brandon, and use that town as a strategic center. At a service of Holy Communion in his cathedral the bishop commissioned her to lead worship, to visit the isolated and sick, to baptize children in danger of death, and to bury the dead. To describe herself and those working with her, Fowler suggested the title “bishop’s messengers,” borrowing the name of an English evangelistic group that Bishop Charles Gore had founded in Oxford in 1917. Fowler and an associate, Muriel Sacretan, arrived in Swan River in June 1927, without workers or money. When they rented a house in the fall and furnished it with a chapel, they called it St. Faith’s, “for we realized we were out on a venture of faith.”33 The rector and the president of the Women’s Auxiliary in the parish helped orient her, and Eva Hasell’s Sunday School caravan crew drove her through the district and introduced her to people. Friends in England helped Fowler recruit workers and sent money. The SPG assisted before World War II, the MSCC afterward. Fowler drew up a constitution for the community of workers and wrote a rule of life with a regular pattern of prayer, designed a habit (a blue dress with a white cross on the front and a blue veil), invited vows of obedience, and organized an obligatory annual retreat. She had created a kind of religious order, but she did not conceive of it as that. She called her community the Guild of St. Faith’s. The Bishop’s Messengers, who were sometimes considered diocesan clergy, organized parish churches within their mission field and functioned as incumbents, except that they did not preside at Holy Communion. They also ran

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anglicans in canada Sunday School by Post for 3,800 children in the area. Gradually, they extended their ministry from English immigrants to people of other nationalities, including indigenous people. Fowler resigned in 1949, and the house moved to The Pas in 1958. Five women had started St. Faith’s with her in 1929, and there were fifty-six when the order was dissolved in 1979. Women lay readers in mission churches in other dioceses were sometimes inaccurately called “Bishop’s Messengers” as well.34

Monica Storrs The diary of Monica Storrs (1888–1967) provides a fascinating record of a woman’s ministry in a pioneering settlement of western Canada. Storrs was the daughter of a Church of England minister who became dean of Rochester.35 He died in 1928, freeing the forty-year-old Storrs for new service, and she entered St. Christopher’s College, Blackheath. There she met Eva Hasell, who told her of the pastoral needs of the little settlement of Fort St. John, British Columbia, in the Peace River country. Storrs wrote to the bishop, made arrangements, and arrived in October 1929, sponsored by the FML as an Anglican teacher. She remained there, aside from visits to England, until 1950 and saw to the building of Anglican churches at Fort St. John, Taylor, Cecil Lake, and Hudson’s Hope.

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Emily Murphy and the “Persons” Case Of all the Anglican women of western Canada during the first few decades of the twentieth century, none was more widely known than Emily Murphy (1868– 1933). Although her career was less Church-oriented than Hasell’s, Fowler’s, or Storrs’s, her life and writing afford important insights into the gender issues of twentieth-century Canadian Anglicanism.36 Born Emily Ferguson into a well-heeled Orange Order family near Cookstown, Ontario, she was a fifteen-year-old student at Bishop Strachan School in Toronto when a Wycliffe College student named Arthur Murphy began taking an interest in her. They were married a few years later when he was a parish priest and an up-and-coming preacher in the diocese of Huron. In an unpublished draft entitled “My Career as a Parson’s Wife” she wrote, “I found that, as a bride of nineteen, I had to take Bible classes, be president of the Missionary Society, play the organ, speak at meetings, organize the entertainments and bazaars. I was, however, acquiring a stability that fitted me for half a dozen other duties.”37 The observation is a reminder that some of the most influential Anglican women in those days were the wives of clergy and bishops, although their contributions have claimed little attention from Canadian historians and might be difficult to recover. When her husband was invited to be a mission preacher in England, Murphy accompanied him and published her experiences in Impressions of Janey

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questions about gender in anglican life Canuck Abroad (1901). The book proved extremely popular and launched her on a prolific writing career. Her author’s persona, Janey, was distinctly Canadian, not English, open, ready for anything, and forthright. Murphy thus contributed to the national project of developing an anglophone Canadian identity. Sickness intervened, however. Her daughter died, and she and her husband were emotionally depleted. Doctors instructed Arthur Murphy to leave the ministry, leave city life, and leave Ontario. The couple joined the huge wave of immigration into Saskatchewan and Alberta during the first decade of the twentieth century. They went first to a timber-limit north of Swan River, Manitoba, in 1903. In her most popular book, Janey Canuck in the West, she describes her first sight of the timber camp and her first Sunday morning there (Document 43). From there they moved to Edmonton in 1907, where she became a crusader for women’s rights and social reform. In 1916 Emily Murphy was appointed a police magistrate, the first woman judge in the British Empire. Murphy’s greatest fame in Canadian women’s history came after 1922, when a Canadian senator from Edmonton died and thousands proposed Murphy as his successor. The Canadian government had scruples, however. As section 24 of the BNA Act of 1867 read, “The Governor-General shall from time to time in the Queen’s name, by Instrument under the Great Seal of Canada, summon qualified persons to the Senate.” The government’s legal counselors advised that a woman, by legislative intent, was not a person within the meaning of the act. Murphy had successfully fought a similar problem in Alberta, and she determined to do the same federally. The Supreme Court Act provided that any five Canadians could petition the Supreme Court of Canada for an interpretation of the BNA Act, and Murphy was one of the “Alberta Five” who asked for a judicial determination of section 24.38 In April 1928 the Supreme Court gave judgment that women did not qualify as persons, referring to the immediately preceding section, which in listing “the qualifications of a Senator” used male pronouns. The Alberta Five then carried an appeal to the king. The Canadian government was embarrassed and did not oppose it. In October 1929 the judicial committee of the Privy Council ruled that the act must be interpreted in the light of present-day custom and so determined that Canadian women were persons for the purposes of appointment to the Senate. Murphy, however, did not become a senator. Murphy’s life is a reminder that the women’s movement did not start in the secular world and later move into the Church. On the contrary, before the middle of the twentieth century Canada was so thoroughly Christian that the distinction would have been hard to draw. Accordingly, the modern secular women’s movement has to a large extent evolved from the work and witness of numerous Christian woman activists, including temperance workers, preachers, missionaries, abolitionists, nursing sisters, deaconesses, religious, and writers. Of these woman activists, Murphy was but one of the most conspicuous.

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Admission of Women to Church Councils As women were being admitted to the decision-making bodies of civil society, Anglicans were widely debating whether they should be admitted to the decision-making bodies of the Church. In the days when pews were sold or rented, membership on parish vestries was often given to pew-holders, who were sometimes women. As pew-holding fell out of fashion, women were excluded from parish vestries. In 1892 the London Free Press published a letter from Emily Murphy, aged twenty-four, who favored admission of women to the parish vestries of the diocese of Huron. The movement to extend woman suffrage to the Anglican Church picked up momentum in the early 1920s. One lobby group in 1923 was publishing a monthly newspaper, the Church Militant.39 Debate abounded. Some in England were objecting that women, once admitted to church councils, soon enough would be ordained to the priesthood.40 In 1920 the Lambeth Conference resolved that “women should be admitted to those Councils of the Church to which laymen are admitted, and on equal terms.” The Canadian Churchman gave space to the topic and in 1923 quoted a speaker as saying, “The early Church called women not only to her service, but to her councils, as did the early British Church. It was the night of the Middle Ages that obliterated her gracious service.”41 The men of General Synod were not so easily moved. In 1924 the diocese of Caledonia elected Inez Smith as a delegate to General Synod. When she arrived at the meeting, the prolocutor took advice on whether to seat her. The lawyers studied the constitutions of the Church and discovered that only persons could be delegates to General Synod, and, as with the BNA Act, it defied their credulity to believe that the term persons included women. The prolocutor’s ruling is given as Document 44. The dean of the diocese of Huron then made a motion to accept the conclusions of the Lambeth Conference on the matter, which would have given women a seat in General Synod after all. His motion was defeated. In 1943 General Synod finally agreed to accept woman delegates from diocesan synods, and at the following session in 1946, Roberta E. Wodehouse took her place as a delegate from the diocese of Yukon. But as yet few diocesan synods allowed women delegates from parishes, and only members of diocesan synods could be delegates to General Synod.

Clara McIntyre From 1926 to 1944 Clara McIntyre was the managing editor of the national Anglican newspaper, the Canadian Churchman. She succeeded to the position as the widow of the late editor. As she recalled, she recognized that her gender should not be publicized, and her name was never listed with the rest of the staff.42

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questions about gender in anglican life

Studies of Women’s Ministry The persistence of disagreement about gender in the Anglican Church of Canada is demonstrated by the number of commissions, committees, and task forces on the subject.

The Anglican National Commission The Anglican National Commission, an elite group, went across Canada between 1928 and 1931, listening to Anglican concerns and inventorying disagreements on the six questions identified in this book (chapter 5). The commission gave extended attention to the status and ministry of women, taking a wide perspective and reaching progressive conclusions (excerpt in Document 45).

The Committee on Women’s Work In 1930 the Lambeth Conference reviewed the role of women in the Church and reaffirmed many statements it had made ten years earlier. The deliberations of the 1930 Lambeth Conference came onto the agenda of the 1931 General Synod, which created the Committee on Women’s Work. That group continued to operate until 1967, when it was superseded by the Commission on Women.

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The Bishops’ Committee, 1932–35 In 1932 the House of Bishops appointed a committee to give particular consideration to the Lambeth resolutions on the role of women. In its final report, tabled in 1935, it surveyed the current ministries of women recognized by the Church. It estimated that perhaps 80 percent of the Church’s seventeen thousand Sunday school teachers were women; moreover, an unknown number served as parish social workers. The Bishops’ Committee identified 124 women in ministry at Indian residential schools and tried to count deaconesses, Women’s Auxiliary missionaries, summer van workers, Bishop’s Messengers in the diocese of Brandon, women doing similar work in other dioceses, and women on the staffs of numerous missions, General Synod boards, and dioceses, and Sunday School by Post. The report listed eleven residential church schools for girls, as well as a number of day schools, hospitals, convalescent homes, mission houses, welfare centers, “homes for defectives or delinquents,” homes for the aged, holiday houses, and fresh-air and Women’s Auxiliary camps, all for women or girls. It also listed Anglican educational opportunities for women, such as the Deaconess House, St. Christopher’s Sunday School Training College in Victoria, theological colleges, Women’s Auxiliary and other training courses, and summer schools. It noted such nationally organized women’s groups as the Women’s Auxiliary, with more than thirty-eight thousand women and almost seven thou-

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anglicans in canada sand girls; the Mother’s Union, with about three thousand members; the Girls’ Friendly Society, with 522 members; the Daughters of the King, with about two hundred members; and various parish societies, choirs, and chancel guilds. It mentioned the influence and contributions of clergy wives. It recognized Anglican participation in such community groups as the National Council of Women, the International Order of the Daughters of the Empire, Girl Guides and Canadian Girls in Training, the Canadian Council of Child and Family Welfare, the Canadian Red Cross, and the Young Women’s Christian Association. It discovered that women who did social work for the Church as deaconesses made, on the average, an equivalent of $900 a year, whereas women who did social work for secular agencies made $1,200 a year. Armed with this copious information, the good bishops had not a clue what to do next. They interviewed a number of prominent Anglican women and men and recommended “heartily” a practice known in England: “that the Bishop of each Diocese should have a list made of Churchwomen engaged in various kinds of professional or institutional work and invite them, from time to time, to a conference with him and a group of interested clergy. Such conferences might be held at a breakfast following a celebration of the Holy Communion.”43 It did not want women to be diocesan delegates to General Synod, and it had no idea what to do about women’s insufficient wages, pensions, or status.

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The Committee on Women’s Work The Committee on Women’s Work was created by General Synod in the 1950s, when women were serving the Church in more capacities than ever before; numbers of religious sisters, vanners, Bishop’s Messengers, and Anglican Women’s Training College (AWTC) students were at all-time highs; and the number of Women’s Auxiliary missionaries in Canada and overseas and the number of deaconesses, although harder to compare, were probably near their peaks. As the decade opened, the Anglican Young People’s Association had just elected, for the first time, a woman to serve as its dominion president. Hazel Journeaux McCallion (b. 1921) from 1978 to this writing has been the mayor of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada’s sixth-largest city. Nevertheless, women were still virtually invisible in Anglican corridors of power. The synod of the diocese of Toronto, for example, with a straight face, resolved in 1950 that “this Synod re-affirms the acceptance of the principle of the full right of women to be elected as members thereof; nevertheless, in the absence of any general demand from women themselves for such privilege, the Synod considers that such an important change in the Constitution should be deferred until there is a demand from women of the Church for such change.”44 As late as 1959, only two delegates at General Synod were women. The disparity between women’s work and their formal, recognized influence had never been greater. In the 1950s the Committee on Women’s Work of General Synod formed a

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questions about gender in anglican life subcommittee on “the future pattern of women’s work in the Church,” with Ruth Soward of Toronto, a Deaconess House graduate, as chair. Some men resented it. A bishop, for example, said that because the committee contained few housewives it was unrepresentative of Anglican women. It interviewed officials, circulated questionnaires, and canvassed women. Its report of 1955 was published, distributed widely, and reprinted in the next General Synod Journal. Formally commended by the Women’s Auxiliary, the report is excerpted as Document 46.

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The 1960s As with missions, social importance, governance, and modernity, Anglican controversies about gender took on a different character during the 1960s. As in these other areas, so with gender roles and norms, the perennial debates were reshaped by several international developments in Western society and in the wider Christian Church. For issues of gender, the most notable social phenomenon of the 1960s was the rise of modern feminism, heralded by books such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Feminism assailed society’s dominant norms and assumptions about gender as repressive, unjust, and demeaning. Perhaps the Anglican Church’s most conspicuous rethinking of gender roles in the 1960s occurred in the context of its discussions of divorce. A General Synod “Commission on Marriage and Related Matters” led by Charles Feilding of Trinity College was a focus of these discussions between 1962 and 1967. The commission reached two major conclusions. First, the Church’s theology and discipline of marriage were always, and rightly, connected to its specific cultural and legal context. Second, for pastoral reasons, no standards could be universal. “The Church throughout history has recognized that not all marriages in human society conform, or are intended to conform,” to the biblical ideal, the commission wrote. More conservative Anglicans complained that their leaders were relativizing biblical norms of gender roles and duties; more progressive Anglicans questioned whether a single ideal of marriage and family life could in fact be found in the Bible. As usual, controversy flared, but in 1967 General Synod passed a revised marriage canon (Canon XXVII), which for the first time permitted the remarriage of divorced persons in certain circumstances. The Parliament of Canada passed the first federal Divorce Act in 1968.45 Meanwhile, diocesan synods were voting to accept women as delegates from parishes. In 1967 only five dioceses still refused to accept them. In 1969 General Synod asked all diocesan synods to open all their elective lay offices to women. In the same year, Betty Graham became the first woman to serve as the prolocutor of the lower house of General Synod, and Ina Caton of the diocese of Saskatoon was appointed the first woman—indeed, the first layperson—to be a canon of an Anglican cathedral. But progress should not be overestimated. In 1967

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anglicans in canada twenty-one of the twenty-eight dioceses still did not allow women to serve as parish churchwardens. A study of women at St. James’s Cathedral in Toronto observes patterns that were likely widespread across Canada. Before the mid-1960s, no groups included men and women together. Vestrymen and sidesmen, for example, were male, whereas Women’s Auxiliary and Dorcas group members were female. Over the next twenty-five years, however, “the gender-defined network of parish activities and organizations broke down.” New groups admitted both men and women. In 1963 a woman was appointed vestry clerk, the chief administrative officer of the parish. In 1965 a woman was appointed to the advisory board. In 1966 a coffee hour was started after Sunday services; men, women, and children began socializing together on a weekly basis. In 1976 women began reading lessons at the eleven o’clock service. The changes affected not only women but also the character of the entire congregation, which became more inclusive. “The women and the things involving women operated as the most powerful motors impelling the overall transformation of the common life of the church as a whole.”46 At the same time, the number of women church workers in the Anglican Church of Canada was declining considerably and not because ordained ministry was opening up to them. In 1967 there were reportedly only about a hundred women in full-time paid ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada as against 2,775 male clergy. Overseas missionaries were less in demand (chapter 1). Only four active deaconesses could be identified in 1967. In general, women were preferring new opportunities in secular employment, where they were rewarded with better salaries, greater job satisfaction, and more harmonious working conditions than they could find in Anglican churches. In 1961 at St. Paul’s, Bloor Street, Toronto, a woman church worker for Christian education and social service was told, “We leave the decisions to the men; they know very well how to run their own businesses.”47 Six years later she left for what would be a teaching career of twenty-five years in the Toronto school system, where she found she could touch lives much more deeply than in the Church. The AWTC was no longer training many Anglican women; it closed its doors in 1969 and moved into Covenant College of the United Church of Canada to form the Centre for Christian Studies, where few Anglicans enrolled. Just as Anglican deaconesses were disappearing in Canada their status was finally clarified. The Lambeth Conference of 1968 decided that women who had been made deaconesses through episcopal laying on of hands had received Holy Orders as deacons. The following summer, General Synod resolved that “in regard to women presently ordained as deaconesses in the Anglican Church of Canada, the Primate be asked to initiate any steps which may be necessary to ensure that those who are so ordered may belong to the diaconate.”48 That November, the House of Bishops decided that ordained deaconesses were to be regarded as members of the diaconate and have equal compensation and equal rights to participate in diocesan synods. The following October, the bishops

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questions about gender in anglican life agreed that liturgies would no longer be used to set apart deaconesses. In the future, when women were to be ordained deacon a bishop would use the rite in the Book of Common Prayer for the ordering of deacons. Symbolic changes are often substantial changes. In the 1960s women in increasing numbers gave up wearing hats and other head-covering to church. There was as well the beginning of serious criticism of male-gendered language (such as the word man and the use of the male pronoun) to refer to women. By the 1980s most such language had disappeared from material produced by General Synod, the larger dioceses, and theological schools, but it was by no means gone from Anglican life in general.

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The Decline of Anglican Women’s Organizations Meanwhile, women’s organizations were losing their independent voice for reasons that have, so far, been little studied.49 From the 1880s, men had urged women’s organizations to surrender their independence, and during the 1960s, they succeeded. The trend began in 1959, when the Women’s Auxiliary gave up autonomy in determining its overseas mission policy and joined its management with that of the MSCC. In 1961 the auxiliary integrated its educational work into the General Synod’s Department of Religious Education. Throughout the 1960s, Anglican women’s leaders were seeking to bring their organizations “into the mainstream of Church life,” the implication being that women’s organizations were not in the mainstream but men’s organizations were. In parish after parish, women’s groups renounced independent fund-raising efforts in favor of parishwide fund-raising involving both men and women. In 1965 the primate, Howard Clark, convened a conference in Scarborough with representatives from the Women’s Auxiliary, Mothers’ Union, the CEWA of Newfoundland, and various parish guilds and chancel guilds, as well as woman church workers and others, and promoted a unified organization. In 1966 the Women’s Auxiliary and most other women’s groups gave up their distinct identities and created an umbrella women’s group, the Anglican Church Women (ACW). In 1969 it and General Synod agreed to move toward closer integration. On January 1, 1973, the national ACW transferred its budget to General Synod and announced that it would be satisfied for women’s concerns to be given to a women’s unit under the Program Committee in order “to increase the participation of women in the national structure of the Church.”50 Integration was completed in January 1974. The historic Living Message of the Women’s Auxiliary abandoned its focus on missionary work and women’s ministry, and its circulation plummeted from thirty-seven thousand in 1967 to 9,500 in 1987. It was then reorganized as a new periodical under an inward-looking, denominational name, Anglican Magazine, and edited by a man. Diocesan and parish branches of the ACW, if they continued to exist at all, were on the wane. Simi-

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larly, women’s groups in many dioceses and parishes were pressed to accept male members, join with existing men’s and mixed groups, or accept male direction. The decline of Anglican women’s organizations, like the decline in the number of lay woman workers, is probably connected with the increase in career opportunities for women in the larger society. Church affairs had been essentially a leisure activity for women, and fewer and fewer found themselves with large sufficiencies of leisure. It has been suggested, too, that ideals of Christian womanhood had been changing during the 1950s, and Anglican women’s organizations were growing out of touch with their constituencies. The Church had too few ministries for women who had professional skills and too many for women with an interest in crafts. Women could achieve equality, some thought, only by having an equal voice with men on the same councils and committees. Some would recall that a few high officials were promising women that the Church would grant parity of male and female membership in its decisionmaking bodies if the women agreed to amalgamate their organizations with the men’s. But no such promises seem to be officially documented, and certainly things did not happen that way.51 The change, like the others discussed in this book, raised old questions in new forms. The old question was, What, if anything, should differentiate men’s and women’s roles in the Church? The current application was, Should Anglican women’s organizations be terminated? Some affirmed that they should. Women could now occupy an equal place with men within the power structures of a formerly male-dominated Church. Others replied that the change was regressive because women had surrendered the last vestiges of independence in a Church in which they were far outnumbered at General Synod, on General Synod committees, and in bureaucracies and had no place whatever in the House of Bishops.

The Ordination of Women The most dramatic Anglican development of the 1970s with respect to gender, and perhaps in any respect, was the ordination of women to the priesthood.52 The topic had been on the fringe of the agendas of the Anglican communion for several decades. The 1930 Lambeth Conference had received two deputations urging the ordination of women, and the English Archbishops’ Commission on the Ministry of Women had considered the topic in 1935. The bishop of Hong Kong had ordained a woman to the priesthood in 1944, causing Anglican bishops of the world to react in horror.53 On the floor of the diocesan synod of Toronto (of which he was chancellor), Reginald Soward began during the late 1940s once a year to propose the ordination of women. When, at the 1954 synod, Soward, who was the husband of Ruth Soward, made his customary motion to appoint a commission “to study the position of women in the full-time work of the Church including the ordi-

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questions about gender in anglican life nation of women,” an observer reported, “There were objections of course, chiefly from the younger clergy (some of the higher type) but on the whole it met with quite a reception much better than ever before. Later in the Synod an amendment was passed to study the question of women’s work leaving out the subject of ordination. Bishop Beverley was strongly against the whole thing but the Synod over-ruled him.”54 Soward’s motion that year lost 178 to 114.55 What decisively brought the issue onto the agenda of Canadian Anglicanism was, as with several issues, a Lambeth Conference. The 1968 conference referred the matter to member provinces for discussion. The process toward ordaining women in the Anglican Church of Canada was, as historian Wendy Fletcher-Marsh has observed, typically Canadian, late in starting, quick in ending, and readily absorbed—a “revolution from above.”56 From the beginning, three bishops were identified as strongly in favor of the ordination of women: John Bothwell of Niagara (b. 1926), Thomas David Somerville (b. 1915) of New Westminster, and Edward Scott (b. 1919), the new primate. Scott’s role was likely decisive. He was a fair and open leader who respected views different from his own, and he was skilled at bringing people together on essential points by compromising on inessential ones. The first official group in the Anglican Church of Canada to make a favorable recommendation on the ordination of women was the Commission on Women, which had been created by the 1967 General Synod to replace a number of miscellaneous committees on women’s issues. General Synod in 1969 directed the primate “to initiate, through a task force or commission, a study of the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood, for report to the next session of General Synod.”57 In fact, the task force, having no great sense of urgency, was unprepared at the next session of General Synod and did not report until 1972. By then the Anglican Consultative Council, a kind of executive committee of the Anglican communion, had decided (in 1971) that there were no fundamental objections of doctrine to the ordination of women. The General Synod task force published a study document supporting it. It acknowledged that specific scriptural verses restricted the teaching of women, enjoined their silence in church, and suggested their subordination to men. Still, it argued, such isolated texts needed to be considered in the light of larger themes of creation, redemption, reconciliation, membership in the Church, and ministry. The more general biblical witness, the document said, was that in Christ through baptism a person’s racial, social, and natural status was overcome for apostleship, discipleship, and ministry (Galatians 3:28). Although tradition had been invoked against the ordination of women, the task force argued that Anglican tradition provided for the contravention of precedents. Apart from the arguments from Scripture and tradition, to which it had responded, it found that other considerations against the ordination of women, such as the possibilities of ecumenical embarrassment or internal schism, had to be counted as of little weight. There was a minority report by one dissentient.

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anglicans in canada The House of Bishops discussed the report in the spring of 1973 just before General Synod met. The bishops generally decided to support the report, provided that a “conscience clause” be passed to protect those Canadian Anglicans who disapproved of the ordination of women. General Synod met that summer and, after considerable and often heated discussion and fending off some creative parliamentary maneuverings, resolved to “accept the principle of the ordination of women.” Implementation was to be delayed until “the House of Bishops has worked out a pattern for the Canadian Church that would include an educational process for the church.”58 The constitution of General Synod provided that changes in matters of doctrine, discipline, or worship required ratification at two successive sessions of General Synod. In December 1974 the House of Bishops concluded that the ordination of women must be considered such a change. The approval in principle, as resolved in 1973, would therefore return to General Synod for reaffirmation in 1975. Shortly thereafter, Cyril Powles of Trinity College circulated a statement (Document 47) among his colleagues at the Anglican seminaries of the country, endorsing the ordination of women. Among the signators were all the professors at Trinity and Wycliffe, except for Eugene Fairweather (who later came to agree with the ordination of women). The statement appeared on the front page of the Canadian Churchman. Before the matter came to debate at General Synod in 1975, Joanne Dewart, then a Roman Catholic theologian at St. Michael’s College in Toronto and later an Anglican priest and a theologian at Trinity College (having changed her name to Joanne McWilliam), addressed the assembly on “Christianity and Feminism” (excerpted as Document 48). Her statement represented the progressive side of mainstream Canadian Anglican thought at the time. The motion for the final approval of the ordination of women to the priesthood was approved after minimal debate by about three-to-one margins in each of the three constituencies—bishops, clergy, and laity. A further resolution affirmed that “it would be appropriate for women qualified for the priesthood to be ordained at the discretion of diocesan bishops acting within the normal procedures of their own jurisdictions and in consultation with the House of Bishops.” Later in the session the “conscience clause” was approved: “Be it resolved that no bishop, priest, deacon or lay person including postulants for ordination of the Anglican Church of Canada should be penalized in any manner, nor suffer any canonical disabilities, nor be forced into positions which violate or coerce his or her conscience as a result of General Synod’s action in affirming the principle of the ordination of women to the priesthood and requests those who have authority in this matter to act upon the principle set out above.” The conscience clause, which tended to undermine the ministry of women priests, was rescinded in 1986 in favor of a statement that “no action which questions the integrity of any priest or postulant on the grounds of sex alone can be defended.”59

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After these resolutions had passed General Synod, a group of more than two hundred Anglican clergy made a formal statement against the ordination of women. In its issue of October 1975, the Canadian Churchman published their “Manifesto” (Document 49), which had bishops and future bishops among its signators. The statement generated a large amount of correspondence to the primate, material that is now stored in the General Synod Archives, and the primate published a pastoral letter in reply. Meeting at the end of October 1975, the House of Bishops reaffirmed its collegial commitment to the ordination of women. It asked the primate to advise other Anglican primates of the decision and directed that the first ordinations of women to the priesthood, if no overwhelmingly negative response exploded in his face, should proceed on St. Andrew’s Day, November 30, 1976. It was agreed, first, that several dioceses should hold ordinations on the same day; second, that men and women should be ordained together; and, third, that press and television coverage should not be permitted at the ordination itself. The first dioceses to ordain women were Cariboo, Huron, New Westminster, and Niagara. The ordination of women was one of a handful of causes, along with liturgical innovations, which prompted some Anglican clergy and laypeople to defect to other churches or join American break-away Anglican groups. The defections and schisms have been less studied in Canada than in the United States, but they are believed to have been small in comparison. An early splinter church, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, which was formed soon after October 1979, was believed to have had only five hundred members.60 It was many more years before women were admitted to the hierarchy of the Church. Victoria Matthews was elected suffragan bishop of Toronto in 1993 and ordained bishop in February 1994.

Continuing Issues for Women in the Church By 1994, formally—the word formally must be stressed—women had equal access to virtually all lay and ordained offices and functions in the Church, a few male choirs and men’s groups to one side and various regional and local deviations excepted. Nevertheless, there was reason to believe that in practice a “stained-glass ceiling” prevented their promotion on an equal basis with men. For instance, a study of five parishes in the diocese of Montreal, published in 1995 although apparently representing research four or five years earlier, found that women were still being excluded from public and official roles: “In terms of institutional change, there is little evidence of change towards greater equality and acknowledgment of women as decision-makers.”61 Across the Anglican Church of Canada, as the twenty-first century dawned, not many women were bishops, deans of cathedrals, cardinal rectors, chairs of strategic committees, or principals of theological colleges. Nor were they equal participants in networks of influence.

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anglicans in canada Language reinforced the inferior status of women clergy. When a woman, Carol Langley, was finally appointed assistant priest at St. James’s Cathedral in Toronto in 1990, “People did not know what to call her, since the cathedral’s tradition of addressing the assistant clergy as ‘father’ would not do. Some called her ‘Carol,’ most called her nothing, while most referred to her superior as ‘the Dean’ or ‘Dean Abraham.’ This contrasting usage made her lower status clear.”62 Moreover, because women still generally carried disproportionate responsibilities for managing homes and caring for children, female ordinands who had family responsibilities found it harder to complete training and find placements. Sixteen of the first eighteen ordained to the priesthood in the Anglican Church of Canada were single, and the other two were widows with grown children. In addition, many ordained women experienced a measure of isolation in their ministries, found recognition and advancement slow, and were frustrated by continuing male clerical norms. Occasional conferences of ordained women, women’s support groups, and some specific Anglican women’s publications have reflected these feelings.

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Anglican Understandings of Gender Anglicans disagreed on the proper role of women because they disagreed on the theology, psychology, spirituality, and social function of gender. What was God’s purpose for gender? Was it marriage? Marriage and procreation? Sexual pleasure? Companionship? Did God have different purposes for male and female? Were there Christian ideals of masculinity and femininity? If so, how were these related to the biological realities of gender as the binary possibility of human anatomy? What was the purpose of marriage? Was the “gift of continency” a higher blessing, as the wedding service of the Church of England implied? It is sometimes assumed that such questions came onto the Anglican agenda only during the 1960s or later on the grounds that Anglicans in earlier years must have either agreed among themselves about them or found it inappropriate to discuss them publicly. Against this view, Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality (1985), proposed an initially surprising but plausible piece of historical revisionism: The Victorian period, despite its reputation for sexual repression, was an age in which people discussed mainstream and peripheral sexualities incessantly. The twentieth century followed this pattern. Like their British and American cousins, Canadian Anglicans in the Victorian age do seem to have devoted considerable attention to matters of gender identity in their sermons, moral and pastoral literature, fiction, and synodical documents. Unfortunately, Canadian religious materials have been studied relatively little, and provisionally we are left to assume that they resembled their American and British counterparts. On this basis, it appears that Canadian Anglicans have disagreed how masculinity and femininity were different, wheth-

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questions about gender in anglican life er they were so by nature or by social construction, and, if by nature, whether as a result of God’s creation or as a consequence of the Fall. In the Victorian and Edwardian periods it seems to have been a majority view that masculinity and femininity were different by God’s design but that masculinity was particularly distorted by the Fall. In consequence, masculinity could be, by grace, at least partially restored to God’s original intentions. An aim of Christianity, therefore, was to elevate the masculine nature into “Christian manliness,” a phrase very frequently used by preachers and religious writers in Victorian Canada as elsewhere to denote a vigorous, morally refined, gentlemanly disposition that enabled men to control their animal energies and redirect them toward service for humanity. In romantic novels such as Jane Eyre, the highest role of femininity was, through love, to raise a man above his fallen nature. Some Anglicans, however, such as the English high-church feminist Ellice Hopkins (1836–1904), challenged such concepts.63 In their many debates on the other themes, whether mission, social role, governance, Church style, or modernity, Anglicans very frequently made connections to gender norms and ideals. For example, they might differentiate the roles of men and women in mission work, governance, and liturgy in various ways, or they might argue that such differentation was unnecessary. And some appealed to gender norms to ridicule or silence their theological opponents, insinuating that those with mistaken attitudes in the other areas were not quite right in their gender identity either. Thus a few studies have suggested that nineteenth-century evangelical and broad-church Anglicans used the language of “Christian manliness” in a derogatory way to question the sexuality of prominent Anglo-Catholics. John Henry Newman and Richard Hurrell Froude were among the earliest targets.64 Critics contrasted the daintiness of high-church priests, dressed in “petticoats” and delicately executing the choreography of liturgical ceremonials, with the muscular Christianity of evangelical missionaries adventuring on dangerous continents. William Westfall observes that Canadian evangelicals used similar tactics in attacking Trinity College, Toronto, in 1859. They could exploit the fact that a year earlier at a college in Oxford the principal, vice principal, and chaplain had been removed in the wake of a scandal involving homosexuality.65 By no means were Anglicans original in linking doctrinal error with sexual deviation The polemics of the earliest centuries of Church history had done the same. After Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), many identified with the view that sexuality is socially learned. Twentieth-century Western popular culture also frequently challenged sexual stereotypes and blurred gender distinctions. Perhaps gender roles were a matter of choice, preference, or personal identity. If so, perhaps the sexual norms enforced by church, state, and the professions were unjustifiably repressive. In December 1967, then-justice minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau proposed decriminalizing sexual acts between consenting adults on the grounds that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the

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anglicans in canada nation,” and in 1969, after Trudeau had become prime minister, Parliament adopted Bill C-150, which removed homosexuality from the Criminal Code. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its standard list of psychiatric disorders, a controversial decision that some believed to be medically justified and others believed politically maneuvered. Provincial legislatures began protecting sexual orientation in human rights statutes, and Anglican discussions of the perennial questions of gender were inevitably shaped by the new social and intellectual context. In churches, gay Christians and others began openly challenging the theological and moral disapproval of homosexuality. In 1969 what would soon be called Dignity, a Roman Catholic support group for gays and lesbians, originated in San Diego. A similar group for U.S. Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans, Integrity, held its first conference in 1975 in Chicago. Its founder, Louie Crew, was later a professor at Rutgers University and is now well known for one of the most extraordinary Internet sites in the Anglican world.66 By the early twentyfirst century, Integrity had three chapters in Canada, in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. By the mid-1970s homosexuality was a contentious issue. Two particular questions crystalized. Should the Church ordain persons in homosexual relationships on the same basis as heterosexual persons, and should the Church bless the unions or marriages of homosexual couples? Those who said no appealed to received theological tradition. From such evidence as the creation stories in the first three chapters of Genesis, Jesus’ brief teaching about marriage, and the biology of reproduction, it seemed clear that it was God’s design for men to be attracted to women and women to men. Exceptions to the rule must be unhealthy, deviant, or sinful. Advocates of change generally argued that sexual preference was not invariably linked to gender identity, either in nature or in the biblical witness; that homosexuality was, for some, natural and therefore must be considered, for them, approved of God; and that, in any event, tolerance and appreciation of personal differences being an essential characteristic of Christian love, the Church should welcome homosexual persons as they were without asking them to change. The first group countered that to accept the world and human nature as they were meant ignoring the consequences of the Fall and leaving no room for an ethics based on covenant morality. The second group rejoined that traditionalists based their understanding of revelation on scriptural passages that did not always mean what they seemed to mean and that, in any event, biblical writers lacked the benefit of a modern understanding of homosexuality. Arguments on both sides of the complex and controversial issue were generally heated. During the next five years, two of a great many books on the subject proved particularly important. In 1976 an American Jesuit psychotherapist, John J. McNeill, published his groundbreaking The Church and the Homosexual. Many

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questions about gender in anglican life of his arguments for the Christian equality of heterosexual and homosexual persons have since become very familiar, particularly his reinterpretations of individual scriptural passages that had previously been assumed to express God’s judgment against homosexual behavior. In 1980 a gay Roman Catholic professor at Yale University, John Boswell, published Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, arguing that early Christians had no theological objection to homosexuality.67 Although criticized by some historians for insufficient scholarship, Boswell’s book was widely influential. It helped move a key United Church of Canada task force toward a progressive position on sexuality, ultimately leading the General Council of that denomination in 1988 to adopt what is still one of the most liberal positions on the ordination of gay clergy of any sizable Christian church in the world. By contrast with the United Church—indeed, by contrast with the Episcopal Church in the United States—the bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada worked for years to keep homosexuality out of the public arenas of Church business (chapter 3). In a brief, ambiguously worded statement in 1978 they affirmed that gays were entitled to protection under the law and to the pastoral care of the Church but reiterated that “the Church confines its nuptial blessing to heterosexual marriage, and we cannot authorize our clergy to bless homosexual unions.”68 The following year they published a further pastoral statement whose subtle phrases appeared to indicate that gay persons might be ordained if they committed themselves to celibacy (although other interpretations were possible). The House of Bishops constitutionally had no independent legislative authority in the Anglican Church of Canada, but this collegial and apparently unanimous statement, published by the only people in the Church who had power to ordain, carried unmistakable weight. The 1978 and 1979 statements remained operative as the millennium dawned. In the meantime, the Church commended discussion and dialog. A study by James Reed, commissioned by the House of Bishops in 1978, was published in 1985 and commended for study. In 1991 the bishops and NEC commissioned a further task force that in 1994 produced the study kit Hearing Diverse Voices, Seeking Common Ground as a resource for parish and local dialog. Although it was widely used, it somewhat disappointed the many opponents and many advocates of change, who alike regarded it as weak in biblical material. Supplementary biblical resources were commissioned after 1995, and dioceses were invited to encourage local dialog. In the 1990s the bishops continued to reaffirm the statements of 1978 and 1979 and continued to prevent both conservatives and progressives (if those terms may be used) from bringing proposals on the issues before the synods. But, beginning in 1992, they did begin to allow discussions of homosexuality in nonlegislative forums at General Synod. Critics complained that the 1992 forum was designed more to promote compassion for victims of homophobia than to guide serious theological analysis. The 1995 General Synod hinted that the bish-

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ops might want to update their 1979 statement, and in 1997 the House of Bishops responded with a new one (Document 50). It did little more than to reaffirm the pronouncements of 1978 and 1979, but, significantly, it did dispense with the fiction of episcopal unanimity by openly acknowledging the divisions among bishops. The General Synod commended the 1997 statement in 1998, and in 2001 it set aside an hour for another forum on the issue. By the winter of 2003, only the synod of the diocese of New Westminster in British Columbia had seriously discussed a formal resolution about homosexuality as a theological and ecclesiastical issue. In fact, it had done so three times, in 1998, 2001, and 2002. In preparation for the discussions, it had commissioned reflection papers and reports that were of a high caliber. On all three occasions the synod approved the blessing of long-term, covenanted homosexual relationships and scoffed at constitutional doubts that a diocesan synod possessed jurisdiction in the matter. So narrow were the votes in 1998 and 2001 that the bishop, Michael Ingham, although personally in favor, thought it prudent to withhold his consent. In 2002 he did assent to the resolution of his synod, creating a new focus for the Anglican debate about gender and sexuality and elevating the temperature of controversy not just in Canada but throughout the Anglican Communion. In May 2003 he authorized a rite for blessing same-sex unions. Ingham was at first privately, and increasingly publicly, criticized by other bishops for breaking rank with his colleagues and elevating the temperature of discussion. But others criticized the rest of the bishops for manipulating or blocking the Church’s constitutional processes. International controversy flared. Was “New West” acting in conformity with God’s call to justice or in violation of God’s call to holiness? Was it leading the Anglican world or leaving it? Whatever the answer to those questions, the synod of New Westminster had become the only one in the country seriously addressing the topical issues that were most on the minds of Anglicans.

Conclusion The history of women in the Anglican Church of Canada has paralleled the history of women in Canada at large. As Canadian women assumed roles of community service, social and moral reform, and political advocacy during the 1870s and 1880s, they did so as well in the Church. As they gained the right to vote and sit in decision-making bodies in Canadian society in during 1910s and 1920s, they did so in the Church, although they had to wait longer to be admitted to most diocesan synods. And they entered the Anglican presbyterate at about the same time that they came into executive positions in small but significant numbers in Canadian corporate and public life during the 1960s and 1970s. Soon after a woman, Kim Campbell, became prime minister of Canada (1993), Victoria Matthews became a bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada (1994).

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questions about gender in anglican life Nevertheless, it should not be concluded that the Church was simply following society. The intimate interweaving of society and religion in Canada before the 1950s makes it impossible to distinguish which impulses to change were social and which were religious. Nineteenth-century feminist leaders were usually influenced by the Church. Temperance workers, abolitionists, nursing sisters, missionaries, preachers, social activists, and leaders of Christian women’s organizations all claimed the leading of the Gospel. At every prospective change in the status of women, Anglicans raised questions. Their discussions about the nature of gender, social custom, and utility sounded the same as those of secular theorists, but they often also appealed to Scripture and Church tradition. Those who wanted women subordinated argued that Scripture and tradition gave the authority of teaching and ruling to men and that certain kinds of Church leadership had always been restricted to men. Their opponents argued that the Bible and Christian tradition recognized the equality of women and men in Christ through baptism and that the Bible and tradition were full of examples of things done for the first time. Perhaps, for Anglicans, a feather’s weight on the side of the balance for change was that three women—Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Anne, and Queen Victoria—had of all the English monarchs likely been the most effective supreme governors of the Church. After the 1960s Anglicans were reframing ancient questions about gender in the context of contemporary social discussions about homosexuality. Did homosexuality reflect God’s design, fallen nature, individual choice, or something else? Could marriage unite persons of the same gender? If so, should the Church give its nuptial blessing? Could a person living with someone of the same gender, in a noncelibate relationship, be considered for ordination? Here, too, there were debates, which were sometimes ferocious. The Church struggled to develop resources to promote a helpful and respectful dialog between persons of differing views.

Notes 1. I know of no full study of the subject for the Anglican Church of Canada, but for parallel developments in the United States an excellent source is Mary Sudman Donovan, A Different Call: Women’s Ministries in the Episcopal Church, 1850–1920 (Wilton: Morehouse-Barlow, 1986); for England, see Brian Heeney, The Women’s Movement in the Church of England, 1850–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 2. H. H. Langton, ed., A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada: The Journals of Anne Langton (Toronto: Irwin, 1950), 108. 3. Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790–1840 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1995), 171ff. 4. Women’s Stories (Spring 1988), published by Women’s Concerns, General Synod. 5. John Irwin Cooper, The Blessed Communion: The Origins and History of the Diocese of

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anglicans in canada Montreal, 1760–1960 (Montreal: Archives Committee of the Diocese of Montreal, 1960), 99– 100, 142–43. 6. Sharon Anne Cook, “To ‘Bear the Burdens of Others Profitably’: The Changing Role of Women in the Diocese of Ottawa, 1896–1996,” in Anglicanism in the Ottawa Valley: Essays for the Centenary of the Diocese of Ottawa, ed. Frank A. Peake (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1997), 129–53. 7. Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 104. 8. Elizabeth Gillan Muir, Petticoats in the Pulpit: The Story of Early Nineteenth Century Methodist Women Preachers in Upper Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1991), 62. 9. Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-NineteenthCentury Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 69. 10. Quoted in Sharon Anne Cook, “‘A Gallant Little Band’: Bertha Wright and the LateNineteenth-Century Evangelical Woman,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 37 (1995): 3–22, quotation on 6 (hereafter JCCHS). 11. Thomas R. Millman, “The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, 1883–1902,” JCCHS 19 (1977): 166–76. 12. Mrs. Willoughby Cummings, Our Story: Some Pages from the History of the Woman’s Auxiliary to the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, 1885 to 1928 (Toronto: Garden City Press, [1928]). There are histories of several diocesan W.A.s. Some information in the text comes from Diocese of Toronto, Women’s Auxiliary, These Fifty Years, 1886– 1936: Woman’s Auxiliary to the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada and to Diocesan Missions (Toronto: Toronto Diocesan Board, [1936]); Betty Baker, ed., Bridge to Tomorrow (Toronto: Diocese of Toronto Anglican Church Women, 1985); and Pauline Bradbrook, “A Brief Account of the Church of England Women’s Association in Newfoundland,” JCCHS 28 (1986): 92–105. 13. Cummings, Our Story, 17, 39, 48–49, 48–51, 55–56, 76–77. 14. Ibid., 17. 15. Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks, 66. 16. Bradbrook, “A Brief Account,” 102. 17. Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 5, 1890, quoted in Cook, “‘A Gallant Little Band,’” 3. 18. The purpose was stated in its Royal Charter of 1926. Olive Parker, For the Family’s Sake: A History of the Mothers’ Union, 1876–1976 (London: Mowbray’s 1975), 27. 19. Girls’ Friendly Society in Canada, Reports (Toronto: Rowsell and Hutchison for The Society, [1884?]-1896), available as Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. A00803. The society continues its work in Britain and the United States. 20. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1971), 1: 505. 21. Katharine N. Hooke, “Women’s Teaching and Service: An Anglican Perspective in Ontario, 1867–1930,” JCCHS 33 (1990): 3–23. 22. [Anon.], A Memoir of the Life and Work of Hannah Grier Coome, Mother-Foundress of the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, Toronto, Canada (London: Oxford University Press, 1933); [Anon.], The Sisterhood of Saint John the Divine, 1884–1984, 4th rev. ed. (N.p., 1984); Katharine N. Hooke, “Women’s Teaching and Service: An Anglican Perspective in Ontario, 1867–1930,” JCCHS 33 (1990): 3–23; see also Heidi Macdonald, “Anglican Women Religious in Two Nova Scotian Hospitals,” JCCHS 37 (1995): 23–40.

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questions about gender in anglican life 23. Members of houses of this and other Anglican orders are listed in Anglican Religious Communities Year Book, 1999, North American ed. (Cincinnati: Forward Movement Publications, 1998). 24. Donovan, A Different Call, 51. 25. Alison Kemper, “Deaconess as Urban Missionary and Ideal Woman: Church of England Initiatives in Toronto 1890–1895,” in Canadian Protestant and Catholic Missions, 1820s-1960s: Historical Essays in Honor of John Webster Grant, ed. John S. Moir and C. T. McIntire (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 171–90; Grace Haldenby, Anglican Women’s Training College: A Background Document (Toronto: AWTC History Committee, 1989); [Anon.], The Story of Anglican Women’s Training College: Diamond Jubilee, 1893–1953 (AWTC? 1953?). 26. Honor Thomas, comp., The Six Lambeth Conferences, 1867–1920 (London: SPCK, 1929), 95–106. 27. W. F. Payton, An Historical Sketch of the Diocese of Saskatchewan of the Anglican Church of Canada (N.p.: 1974?), 94–95. 28. Many women’s historians report that one of the greatest difficulties they encounter during their research is finding women’s Christian names. 29. Marilyn Barber, “The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf Teachers,” in The Anglican Church and the World of Western Canada, 1820–1970, ed. Barry Ferguson (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1991), 154–166. 30. Vera Fast, Missionary on Wheels: Eva Hasell and the Sunday School Caravan Missions (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1979). 31. Fast, Missionary on Wheels, 44. 32. Marguerita D. Fowler, The Story of St. Faith’s (London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1950); Alyson Barnett-Cowan, “The Bishop’s Messengers,” in The Anglican Church and the World of Western Canada, 1820–1970, ed. Barry Ferguson (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1991), 176–87. 33. Fowler, The Story of St. Faith’s, 13. 34. The term was used commonly, although imprecisely, of women ministers in the diocese of Athabasca, for example. Meredith Hill, “The Women Workers of the Diocese of Athabasca, 1930–1970,” JCCHS 28 (1986): 63–74. 35. W. L. Morton, ed., God’s Galloping Girl: The Peace River Diaries of Monica Storrs, 1929– 1931 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1979). 36. Byrne Hope Sanders, Emily Murphy: Crusader (“Janey Canuck”) (Toronto: Macmillan, 1945). 37. Sanders, Emily Murphy, 30–33. 38. The other members of the Alberta Five in the “persons case” were Louise McKinney, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, and Henrietta Muir Edwards. 39. The group advertised itself in the Year Book of the Church of England in Canada (1923), 31. 40. Heeney, The Women’s Movement, 108. 41. Resolution 46 of the Lambeth Conference of 1920, in The Six Lambeth Conferences, 39; I. Augusta Templeton-Armstrong, “The Ministry of Women,” Canadian Churchman, May 17, 1923, 320. 42. Ann Benedek, “Readers Were Unaware Editor Was a Woman,” Canadian Churchman 101 (June 1975): 29. 43. House of Bishops, “Report on Women’s Work in the Church” (1935), box 25, 76–15, General Synod Archives, Toronto.

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anglicans in canada 44. Toronto Synod Journal (1950): 90. 45. General Synod Journal (1967): 339 (hereafter GSJ). 46. C. T. McIntire, “Women in the Life of St. James’ Cathedral, Toronto, 1935–1998,” JCCHS 40 (1998): 121–56; see also Wendy L. Fletcher-Marsh, “The Limitations and Opportunity of Gender: Women and Ecclesiastical Structures in Canadian Anglicanism, 1920–1955,” JCCHS 37 (1995): 41–54. 47. Haldenby, Anglican Women’s Training College, 93. 48. GSJ (1969): 147. 49. Pauline Bradbrook, “Anglican Church Women: In or Out?” in Justice as Mission: An Agenda for the Church, ed. Terry Brown and Christopher Lind (Burlington, Ont.: Trinity Press, 1985), 126–35. 50. GSJ (1973): 144. 51. Marjorie Agnes Powles, To a Strange Land: The Autobiography of Marjorie Agnes Powles (Dundas, Ont.: Artemis Enterprises, 1993), 126. 52. Wendy Fletcher, Beyond the Walled Garden: Anglican Women and the Priesthood (Dundas, Ont.: Artemis Enterprises, 1995). 53. Florence Tim-Oi Li (1907–92) ended her ministry as associate priest at St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Chinese Anglican Church, Toronto (1983–90). 54. Miss F. M. Watts, deaconess, to Mrs. R. E. Wodehouse, June 3, 1954, box 25, 76–15, General Synod Archives. 55. Toronto Synod Journal (1954): 83. 56. Fletcher, Beyond the Walled Garden, 109. 57. GSJ (1969): 46–47; the report is discussed in Fletcher-March, Beyond the Walled Garden, 80–89. 58. GSJ (1973): M18–20. 59. GSJ (1975): M50, M66; GSJ (1986): 114–15. 60. Donald S. Armentrout, “Episcopal Splinter Groups: A Study of Groups which Have Left the Episcopal Church, 1873–1985” typescript, University of the South School of Theology, Sewanee, Tenn., 1985. 61. Joan Marshall, A Solitary Pillar: Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1995), 163. 62. McIntire, “Women in the Life of St. James’,” 147. 63. Sue Morgan, A Passion for Purity: Ellice Hopkins and the Politics of Gender in the Late Victorian Church (Bristol: Centre for Comparative Studies in Religion and Gender, 1999), 112. 64. David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25 (1981–82): 181–212. 65. William Westfall, The Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2002), 88. 66. For Crew’s memoirs of the founding, see Louie Crew, “Changing the Church: Lesson Learned in the Struggle to Reduce Institutional Heterosexism in the Episcopal Church,” in Combatting Homophobia, ed. James Sear and Walter Williams (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 341–53 and reproduced on Crew’s Web-site: http://newark.rutgers.edu/lcrew/ gayhist.htm. Accessed on July 15, 2003 67. John J. McNeill, The Church and the Homosexual (Kansas City, Kan.: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 1976); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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68. The bishops’ statement of 1978 is published in [Anglican Church of Canada, National Executive Council, Committee on Human Sexuality], A Study Resource on Human Sexuality: Approaches to Sexuality and Christian Theology, ed. James Reed (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1985), 17–18; see also Anglican Church of Canada, Taskforce on Homosexuality and Homosexual Relationships, Hearing Diverse Voices, Seeking Common Ground: A Program of Study on Homsexuality and Homosexual Relationships (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1994), 17–18.

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Epilogue

In many Christian churches, controversies are settled by some combination of power, authority, and schism. In Canadian Anglicanism, controversies have seldom been settled at all. The Anglican Church has made few decisions that it could not revisit. The most notable irreversible decisions it has made voluntarily have been granting independence to its mission fields and ordaining women to the priesthood; other important irreversible decisions affecting its life, such as disestablishment and disendowment, were made or forced by others. In the end, therefore, the character of Canadian Anglicanism has been determined not by how it has resolved its questions but by the character of its questioning. Canadian Anglicanism cannot be located on a chart of the world’s religions in the way Kuwait can be located on a map of the world. It has no clear, defined boundaries. Church leaders may have ideas where they might like the boundaries drawn, but they do not agree among themselves, and members do not have to agree with the leaders. The outlines of Canadian Anglicanism are rather like a seashore, where the boundary between land and sea is both immeasurably ambiguous and constantly changing—between high tide and low tide, between each breaker, and between sandy water and watery sand—and more accurately mapped over a long timeframe than in any particular moment. The ambiguity, variability, and complexity of the boundaries of Canadian Anglicanism have made controversies about its identity inevitable and agreement impossible. The controversies have involved fundamental questions perennially asked about mission, social purpose, governance, Church style, inculturation, and gender; a concern to frame these questions appropriately to the historical context; a shared sense among Canadian Anglicans that the questions are important to discuss; characteristic formal and informal processes for addressing them; efforts to agree on relevant theological resources and authorities; an intention to agree on an acceptable spectrum of views; and reluctance to exclude anyone who wants to participate in the conversation.

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epilogue There are strengths in a being a church that so regularly reviews, reconstructs, and changes. One is that it more easily represents the Spirit, who blows free like the wind. It also more easily preserves itself from becoming an idol to members; an unchanging Church would seem to point to itself as eternal rather than to the Other as eternal. But there are problems, too, and one is that many Canadian Anglicans have been discouraged by the Church’s variability. They frequently feel they have lost something treasured, perhaps a doctrine or a pattern of worship or a moral standard that once seemed immutable. Several examples are discussed in this book. For John Strachan, it was Church establishment; for Edward Cridge, an impregnable Protestant ecclesiology; for Dyson Hague, the premodern interpretation of Scripture; and for the two hundred clergy petitioners of 1975, the all-male priesthood. Given these experiences, Canadian Anglicans naturally fear that any of the remaining elements of Anglicanism that still seem essential might at any point be taken away from them. Their fear has been a cause of their controversies. For those who look to the Anglican Church of Canada for the defense of timeless principles any more specific than the lordship of Christ, the lessons of history can be discouraging. The argument of this book is that those looking for the identity of Canadian Anglicanism in permanent elements of institutional structure or practice or theology have been looking for it in the wrong place. But they might not find that observation consoling. Shifting outlines in matters of doctrine have frequently been remarked in Canadian Anglicanism. The Anglican National Commission of 1931, for example, praised “the breadth, comprehensiveness, and charity of our Church” but at the same time recognized that “the wide divergence of teaching and practice gives an impression of vagueness, and of a lack of coherence in teaching.” Many in the Church, it said, longed for “an authoritative statement as to the main boundaries of doctrine and practice.” They have not been rewarded. In 1978 Stephen Sykes, then a professor of theology at the University of Durham, suggested in his very influential The Integrity of Anglicanism that the reason why the Anglican Church was so unsure what it stood for was its ethos of theological comprehensiveness, the product of liberalism. In Canada, however, the impossibility of identifying a clear shape of Anglicanism preceded modern liberalism by many years. Anglican identity in Canada has never involved core principles, unchanging ideas, clear boundaries, or permanent practices but a set of themes persistently engaged. Canadian Anglicans have never agreed on answers, notwithstanding familiar rhetoric of “we have always done it that way” or the feeling that the Church’s teaching used to be clearer once upon a time. The identity of Canadian Anglicanism, finally, is found in the fact that it has in every period, as a matter of principle, included all Anglicans in a broad discussion of the central questions of church identity. True, in practice it has nev-

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er valued all opinions equally. Nor has it ever admitted more than a few to the corridors of power. But all who have cared to consider themselves Anglican could be part of the discussion. There were no clear rules or standards of membership by which to exclude anyone. The distinctive identity of Canadian Anglicanism has been located in this ongoing discussion because it has functioned as the essential activity of an intentional and ordered community of faithful people accepting the lordship of Christ, the authority of Scripture, and the commandment to love while living in diverse and changing historical situations. At the beginning of this book I identified three Anglican models for relating the Church and society, each named for the national branch of the Anglican communion where it had the most advocates between about 1770 and 1830. All the models started with the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, an episcopal church order, and a common history that flowed through the English Reformation. All influenced Canadian Anglicanism. From the English model, Canadian Anglicans took the sense that the Church should direct attention to the material, educational, moral, and spiritual needs of its society. The danger of that establishmentarian model is that the Church could seriously compromise its independence and integrity. From the American model, Canadian Anglicans took the sense that the Church is a social citizen among other social citizens and that its spiritual and moral leadership derives, under God, from the commitment and example of its members, organized through representative constitutional structures. The danger of that popular model is that the Church might be blown by the winds of fashion or, as in the American Republic, might put unwarranted confidence in fallible leaders. From the Irish model, Canadian Anglicans took the sense that the Church is the steward of pure doctrine based in Scripture and that it might sometimes be necessary for it to witness the truth in militant and unpopular ways. The danger of that ideological model is that the Church might succumb to insensitivity or bigotry. The Canadian model of Anglicanism, therefore, like the Canadian model of much else, has been a distinctive balance of the American, the English, and the Irish. I do not discern that Canadian Anglicans have created a model of their own, although perhaps they may do so yet by integrating the reflections of First Nations Anglicans. Perhaps balance itself is the distinctive and characteristic Canadian achievement. It was hard-won through a vigorous, not always entirely willing, conversation among partners representing both genders and a great diversity of nationalities, social classes, educational backgrounds, theological commitments, Church styles, and personal identities and interests. The conversation received direction, structure, texture, and vocabulary from the Bible and a tradition of Church order; from the vast geography of a northern country; from patterns of education, imagination, and interpretation; and from a complex social history of colonial experience and pioneer life, railways and immigration, indus-

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epilogue

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trialization and war, and internationalism and multiculturalism. Thus shaped and textured, the conversation has always engaged six themes so large in scope, so unavoidable, and so immediate that they could never be definitively and permanently answered. And so Canadian Anglicans continued to carry on their disagreements in their own way.

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Documents

Document 1 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Instructions for the Clergy Employ’d by the Society (1706) (Complete)

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Upon Their Admission by the Society. I. that, from the Time of their Admission, they lodge not in any public house; but at some Bookseller’s, or in other private and reputable Families, till they shall be otherwise accommodated by the Society. II. That till they can have a convenient Passage, they employ their Time usefully: in Reading Prayers, and Preaching, as they have Opportunity; in hearing others Read and Preach; or in such studies as may tend to fit them for their Employment. III. That they constantly attend the Standing Committee of this Society, at the Secretary’s, and observe their Directions. IV. That before their Departure they wait upon his Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, their Metropolitan, and upon the Lord Bishop of London, their Diocesan, to receive their Paternal Benediction and Instructions.

Upon their going on Board the Ship designed for their Passage. I. that they demean themselves not only inoffensively and prudently, but so as to become remarkable Examples of Piety and Virtue to the Ship’s Company. II. That whether they be Chaplains in the Ships, or only Passengers, they endeavour to prevail with the Captain or Commander, to have Morning and Evening Prayer said daily; as also Preaching and Catechizing every Lord’s Day.

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document 1 III. That throughout their Passage they Instruct, Exhort, Admonish, and Reprove, as they have occasion and opportunity, with such Seriousness and Prudence, as may gain them Reputation and Authority.

Upon their Arrival in the Country whither they shall be Sent.

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First, With Respect to themselves. I. that they always keep in their View the great Design of their Undertaking, viz., To promote the Glory of Almighty God, and the Salvation of Men, by Propagating the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour. II. That they often consider the Qualifications requisite for those who would effectually promote this Design, viz. A sound Knowledge and hearty Belief of the Christian Religion; an Apostolical Zeal, tempered with Prudence, Humility, Meekness and Patience; a fervent Charity towards the Souls of Men; and finally, that Temperance, Fortitude, and Constancy, which become good Soldiers of Jesus Christ. III. That in order to the obtaining and preserving the said Qualifications, they do very frequently in their Retirements, offer up fervent Prayers to Almighty God for his Direction and Assistance; converse much with the Holy Scriptures; seriously reflect upon their Ordination Vows; and consider the Account which they are to render to the great Shepherd and Bishop of our Souls at the last Day, IV. That they acquaint themselves thoroughly with the Doctrine of the Church of England, as contained in the Articles and Homilies; its Worship and Discipline, and Rules for Behaviour of the Clergy, as contained in the Liturgy and Canons; and that they approve themselves accordingly, as genuine Missionaries from this Church. V. That they endeavour to make themselves Masters in those Controversies which are necessary to be understood, in order to the Preserving their Flock from the Attempts of such Gainsayers as are mixed among them. VI. That in their outward Behaviour they be circumspect and unblameable, giving no Offence either in Word or Deed; that their ordinary Discourse be grave and edifying; their Apparel decent, and proper for Clergymen; and that in their whole Conversation they be Instances and Patterns of the Christian Life. VII. That they do not board in, or frequent Publick-houses, or lodge in Families of evil Fame; that they wholly abstain from Gaming, and all such Pastimes; and converse not familiarly with lewd or prophane Persons, otherwise than in order to reprove, admonish, and reclaim them. VIII. That in whatsoever Family they shall lodge, they persuade them to join with them in daily Prayer Morning and Evening. IX. That they be not nice about Meats and Drinks, nor immoderately careful about their Entertainment in the Places where they shall sojourn; but contented with what Health requires, and the Place easily affords.

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document 1 X. That as they be frugal, in Opposition to Luxury, so they avoid all Appearance of Covetousness, and recommend themselves, according to their Abilities, by the prudent Exercise of Liberality and Charity. XI. That they take special Care to give no Offence to the Civil Government, by intermeddling in Affairs not relating to their own Calling and Function. XII. That, avoiding all Names of Distinction, they endeavour to preserve a Christian Agreement and Union one with another, as a Body of Brethren of one and the same Church, united under the Superior Episcopal Order, and all engaged in the same great Design of Propagating the Gospel; and to this End, keeping up a Brotherly Correspondence, by meeting together at certain Times, as shall be most convenient, for mutual Advice and Assistance.

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Secondly, With respect to their Parochial Cure. I. that they conscientiously observe the Rules of our Liturgy, in the Performance of all the Offices of their Ministry. II. That, besides the stated Service appointed for Sundays and Holidays, they do, as far as they shall find it practicable, publickly read the daily Morning and Evening Service, and decline no fair Opportunity of Preaching to such as may be occasionally met together from remote and distant Parts. III. That they perform every Part of Divine Service with that Seriousness and Decency, that may recommend their Ministrations to their Flock, and excite a Spirit of Devotion in them. IV. That the chief Subjects of their Sermons be the great Fundamental Principles of Christianity, and the Duties of a sober, righteous, and godly Life, as resulting from those Principles. V. That they particularly preach against those Vices which they shall observe to be most predominant in the Places of their Residence. VI. That they carefully instruct the People concerning the Nature and Use of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as the peculiar Institutions of Christ, Pledges of Communion with Him, and Means of deriving Grace from Him. VII. That they duly consider the Qualifications of those adult Persons to whom they administer Baptism; and of those likewise whom they admit to the Lord’s Supper; according to the Directions of the Rubricks in our Liturgy. VIII. That they take special Care to lay a good Foundation for all their other Ministrations, by Catechizing those under their Care, whether Children, or other ignorant Persons, explaining the Catechism to them in the most easy and familiar Manner. IX. That in their instructing Heathens and Infidels, they begin with the Principles of Natural Religion, appealing to their Reason and Conscience; and thence proceed to shew them the Necessity of Revelation, and the Certainty of that contained in the Holy Scriptures, by the plainest and most obvious Arguments.

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X. That they frequently visit their respective Parishioners; those of our own Communion, to keep them steady in the Profession and Practice of Religion, as taught in the Church of England; those that oppose us, or dissent from us, to convince and reclaim them with a Spirit of Meekness and Gentleness. XI. That those, whose Parishes shall be of large Extent, shall, as they have Opportunity and Convenience, officiate in the several Parts thereof, so that all the Inhabitants may by Turns partake of their Ministrations, and that such as shall be appointed to officiate in several Places shall reside sometimes at one, sometimes at another of those Places, as the Necessities of the People shall require. XII. That they shall, to the best of their Judgments, distribute those small Tracts given by the Society for that Purpose, amongst such of their Parishioners as shall want them most, and appear likely to make the best Use of them; and that such useful Books, of which they have not a sufficient Number to give, they be ready to lend to those who will be most careful in reading and restoring them. XIII. That they encourage the setting up of Schools for the teaching of Children; and particularly by the Widows of such Clergymen as shall die in those Countries, if they be found capable of that Employment. XIV. That each of them keep a Register of his Parishioners’ Names, Profession of Religion, Baptism, &c. according to the Scheme annexed, No. I for his own Satisfaction, and the Benefit of the People.

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No I. Notitia Parochialis; to be made by each Minister soon after his Acquaintance with his People, and kept by him for his own Ease and Comfort, as well as the Benefit of his Parishioners. I. Names of

II. Profession of

III. Which of

IV. When

V. Which of

VI. When they

VII. What

Parishioners

Religion

them baptized

baptized

them Communicants

first communicated

obstructions they meet with in their Ministration

Thirdly, With respect to the Society. I. that each of them keep a constant and regular Correspondence with the Society, by their Secretary. II. That they send every six Months an Account of the State of their respective Parishes, according to the Scheme annexed, No. II.

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document 1 No II. Notitia Parochialis; or an Account to be sent Home every six Months to the Society by each Minister, concerning the spiritual State of their respective Parishes. I.

Number of Inhabitants.

II.

No. of the Baptized.

III.

No. of Adult Persons baptized this Half-year.

IV.

No. of actual Communicants of the Church of England.

V.

No. of those who profess themselves of the Church of England.

VI.

No. of Dissenters of all Sorts, particularly Papists.

VII.

No. of Heathens and Infidels.

*VIII.

No. of Converts from a prophane, disorderly and unchristian Course, to a Life of Christian Purity, Meekness, and Charity.

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III. That they communicate what shall be done at the Meetings of the Clergy, when settled, and whatsoever else may concern the Society. *[Item viii added in later edition.] Source: Charles F. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (London: SPG, 1901), 2: 837–40.

Document 2 Excerpts from John West, The Substance of a Journal during a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America On the 27th of May, 1820, I embarked at Gravesend, on board the Honourable Hudson’s Bay Company’s ship, the Eddystone; accompanied by the ship, Prince of Wales, and the Luna brig, for Hudson’s Bay. In my appointment as Chaplain to the Company, my instructions were, to reside at the Red River Settlement, and under the encouragement and aid of the Church Missionary Society, I was to seek the instruction, and endeavour to meliorate the condition of the native Indians. The anchor was weighed early on the following morning, and sailing with

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document 2 a fine breeze, the sea soon opened to our view. The thought that I was now leaving all that was dear to me upon earth, to encounter the perils of the ocean, and the wilderness, sensibly affected me at times; but my feelings were relieved in the sanguine hope that I was borne on my way under the guidance of a kind protecting Providence, and that the circumstances of the country whither I was bound, would soon admit of my being surrounded with my family. With these sentiments, I saw point after point sink in the horizon, as we passed the shores of England and Scotland for the Orkneys. . . . In the evening of the 13th [August], the sailors gave three cheers, as we got under weigh on the opening of the ice by a strong northerly wind, and left the vast mass which had jammed us in for many days. The next day we saw the land, and came to the anchorage at York Flatts the following morning, with sentiments of gratitude to God for his protecting Providence through the perils of the ice and of the sea, and for the little interruption in the duties of my profession from the state of the weather, during the voyage. I was kindly received by the Governor at the Factory, the principal depôt of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and on the sabbath, every arrangement was made for the attendance of the Company’s servants on divine worship, both parts of the day. Observing a number of half-breed children running about, growing up in ignorance and idleness; and being informed that they were a numerous offspring of Europeans by Indian women, and found at all the Company’s Posts; I drew up a plan, which I submitted to the Governor, for collecting a certain number of them, to be maintained, clothed, and educated upon a regularly organized system. It was transmitted by him to the Committee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose benevolent feelings towards this neglected race, had induced them to send several schoolmasters to the country, fifteen or sixteen years ago; but who were unhappily diverted from their original purpose, and became engaged as fur traders. During my stay at this post, I visited several Indian families, and no sooner saw them crowded together in their miserable-looking tents, than I felt a lively interest (as I anticipated) in their behalf. Unlike the Esquimaux I had seen in Hudson’s Straits, with their flat, fat, greasy faces, these ‘Swampy Crees’ presented a way-worn countenance, which depicted “Suffering without comfort, while they sunk without hope.” The contrast was striking, and forcibly impressed my mind with the idea, that Indians who knew not the corrupt influence and barter of spirituous liquors at a Trading Post, were far happier, than the wretchedlooking group around me. The duty devolved upon me, to seek to meliorate their sad condition, as degraded and emaciated, wandering in ignorance, and wearing away a short existence in one continued succession of hardships in procuring food. I was told of difficulties, and some spoke of impossibilities in the way of teaching them Christianity or the first rudiments of settled and civilized life; but with a combination of opposing circumstances, I determined not to be intimidated, nor to “confer with flesh and blood,” but to put my hand immedi-

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document 2 ately to the plough, in the attempt to break in upon this heathen wilderness. If little hope could be cherished of the adult Indian in his wandering and unsettled habits of life, it appeared to me, that a wide and most extensive field, presented itself for the cultivation in the instruction of the native children. With the aid of an interpreter, I spoke to an Indian, called Withaweecapo, about taking two of his boys to the Red River Colony with me to educate and maintain. He yielded to my request; and I shall never forget the affectionate manner in which he brought the eldest boy in his arms, and placed him in the canoe on the morning of my departure from York Factory. His two wives, sisters, accompanied him to the water’s edge, and while they stood gazing on us, as the canoe was paddled from the shore, I considered that I bore a pledge from the Indian that many more children might be found, if an establishment were formed in British Christian sympathy, and British liberality for their education and support. I had to establish the principle, that the North-American Indian of these regions would part with his children, to be educated in white man’s knowledge and religion. The above circumstance therefore afforded us no small encouragement, in embarking for the colony [of Red River]. We overtook the boats going thither on the 7th of September, slowly proceeding through a most difficult and laborious navigation. . . . The blasphemy of the men, in the difficulties they had to encounter, was truly painful to me. I had hoped better things of the Scotch, from their known moral and enlightened education; but their horrid imprecations proved a degeneracy of character in an Indian country. This I lamented to find was too generally the case with Europeans, particularly so in their barbarous treatment of women. They do not admit them as their companions, nor do they allow them to eat at their tables, but degrade them merely as slaves to their arbitrary inclinations; while the children grow up wild and uncultivated as the heathen. . . . It often grieved me, in our hurried passage, to see the men employed in taking the goods over the carrying places, or in rowing, during the Sabbath. I contemplated the delight with which thousands in England enjoyed the privileges of this sacred day, and welcomed divine ordinances. . . . On the 14th of October we reached the settlement, consisting of a number of huts widely scattered along the margin of the river; in vain did I look for a cluster of cottages, where the hum of a small population at least might be heard as in a village. I saw but few marks of human industry in the cultivation of the soil. Almost every inhabitant we passed bore a gun upon his shoulder and all appeared in a wild and hunter-like state. The colonists were a compound of individuals of various countries. They were principally Canadians, and Germans of the Meuron regiment; who were discharged in Canada at the conclusion of the American war, and were mostly Catholics. There was a large population of Scotch emigrants also, who with some retired servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company were chiefly Protestants, and by far the most industrious in agricultural pursuits. There was an unfinished building as a Catholic church, and a

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document 2 small house adjoining, the residence of the Priest; but no Protestant manse, church, or school house, which obliged me to take up my abode at the Colony Fort, (Fort Douglas,) where the ‘Chargé d’Affaires’ of the settlement resided; and who kindly afforded the accommodation of a room for divine worship on the sabbath. My ministry was generally well attended by the settlers; and soon after my arrival I got a log-house repaired about three miles below the Fort, among the Scotch population, where the schoolmaster took up his abode, and began teaching from twenty to twenty-five of the children. . . . December the 6th. My residence was now removed to the farm belonging to the late Earl of Selkirk, about three miles from Fort Douglas, and six from the school. Though more comfortable in my quarters, than at the Fort, the distance put me to much inconvenience in my professional duties. We continued, however, to have divine service regularly on the Sabbath; and having frequently enforced the moral, and social obligation of marriage upon those who were living with, and had families by Indian, or half caste women, I had the happiness to perform the ceremony for several of the most respectable of the settlers, under the conviction, that the institution of marriage, and the security of property, were the fundamental laws of society. I had also many baptisms; and with infants, some adult half-breeds were brought to be baptized. I endeavoured to explain to them simply and faithfully the nature and object of that Divine ordinance; but found great difficulty in conveying to their minds any just and true ideas of the Saviour, who gave the commission, on his ascension into heaven “To go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” This difficulty produced in me a strong desire to extend the blessing of education to them; and from this period it became a leading object with me, to erect in a central situation, a substantial building, which should contain apartments for the schoolmaster, afford accommodation for Indian children, be a day-school for the children of the settlers, enable us to establish a Sunday school for the half-caste adult population who would attend, and fully answer the purpose of a church for the present, till a brighter prospect arose in the colony, and its inhabitants were more congregated. I became anxious to see such a building arise as a Protestant land-mark of Christianity in a vast field of heathenism and general depravity of manners, and cheerfully gave my hand and my heart to perfect the work. I expected a willing co-operation from the Scotch settlers; but was disappointed in my sanguine hopes of their cheerful and persevering assistance, through their prejudices against the English Liturgy, and the simple rites of our communion. I visited them however in their affliction, and performed all ministerial duties as their Pastor; while my motto, was—Perseverance. . . . On the 5th of October [1822] we reached the encampment of Pigewis, the chief of the Red River Indians; and on pitching our tents for the night a little way farther up on the banks of the river, he came with his eldest son and another Indian and drank tea with me in the evening. . . . I was glad of the op-

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document 2 portunity of assuring him, through the aid of an interpreter, who was of our party, “that many, very many in my country wished the Indians to be taught white man’s knowledge of the Great Spirit, and as a proof of their love to them, my countrymen had told me to provide for the clothing, maintenance, and education of many of their children; and had sent out the young person whom he then saw to teach the little girls who might be sent to the school for instruction.” Though not easily persuaded that you act from benevolent motives; he said it was good! and promised to tell all his tribe what I said about the children, and that I should have two of his boys to instruct in the Spring, but added, that ‘the Indians like to have time to consider about these matters.’ We smoked the calumet, and after pausing a short time, he shrewdly asked me what I would do with the children after they were taught what I wished them to know. I told him they might return to their parents if they wished it, but my hope was that they would see the advantage of making gardens, and cultivating the soil, so as not to be exposed to hunger and starvation, as the Indians generally were, who had to wander and hunt for their provisions. The little girls, I observed, would be taught to knit, and make articles of clothing to wear, like those which white people wore; and all would be led to read the Book that the Great Spirit had given to them, which the Indians had not yet known, and which would teach them how to live well and to die happy. I added, that it was the will of the Great Spirit, which he had declared in His Book, ‘that a man should have but one wife, and a woman but one husband.’ He smiled at this information, and said that ‘he thought that there was no more harm in Indians having two wives than one of the settlers,’ whom he named. I grieved for the depravity of Europeans as noticed by the heathen, and as raising a stumblingblock in the way of their receiving instruction, and our conversation closed upon the subject by my observing, that ‘there were some very bad white people, as there were some very bad Indians, but that the good book condemned the practice.’ . . . June 2 [1823]. I have been adding two small houses to the Church Mission School, as separate sleeping apartments for the Indian children, who have already made most encouraging progress in reading, and a few of them in writing. . . . Our Sunday school is generally attended by nearly fifty scholars, including adults, independent of the Indian children; and the congregations consists upon an average of from one hundred to one hundred and thirty persons. It is a most gratifying sight to see the Colonists, in groups, direct their steps on the Sabbath morning towards the Mission house, at the ringing of the bell, which is now elevated in a spire that is attached to the building. . . . I never witnessed the Establishment but with peculiar feelings of delight, and contemplated it as the dawn of a brighter day in the dark interior of a moral wilderness. The lengthened shadows of the setting sun cast upon the buildings, as I returned from calling upon some of the Settlers a few evenings ago; and the consideration that there was now a landmark of Christianity in this wild waste of heathenism, raised in my mind a pleasing train of thought, with the sanguine hope that this

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document 3 Protestant Establishment might be the means of raising a spiritual temple to the Lord, to whom “the heathen are given as an inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth as a possession.” Source: John West, M.A., The Substance of a Journal during a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America: and Frequent Excursions among the North-West American Indians in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 1823 (London: L. B. Seeley and Son, 1824).

Document 3

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From Peguis, Chief of the Red River Indians (1838) (Complete) Servants of the great God: We once more call to you for protection and assistance; and hope it will not be altogether unavailing. You sent us which you call the Word of God, and the Word of Life. We left our hunting-grounds, and came to the Word of Life. When we heard the Word of God, we did not altogether like it; for it told us to leave off getting drunk, to leave off adultery, to keep only one wife, and to cast away our idols, our rattles, drums, and our gods, and all our bad heathen ways; but the Word of God repeatingly telling us, that if we did not leave off all our bad devils, and all our bad heathen ways, that the Great God would send us all to the great devil’s fire, by the goodness of your God we seed that the Word of God was true. We now like the Word of God; and we left off getting drunk, left off adultery, cast away our wives—married one, cast away our rattles, drums, idols, and all our bad heathen ways. Mr. Jones is now going to leave us. Mr. Cockran is talking of leaving us. Must we turn to our idols and gods again? Or must we turn to the French PrayingMasters for protection and assistance, where a good three French Praying-Masters has arrived in the River, and not one for us. What is this, our friends? The Word of God says, that one soul is worth more than all the world. Surely then, our friends, 300 souls is worthy of one Praying-Master. Can it be expected that once or twice teaching to a child can be sufficient to make him wise, or to enable him to guide himself through life. No, our friends; and we are the same. It is not once or twice a week teaching can be sufficient to make us wise: we have bad hearts, and we hate our bad hearts, and all our evil ways and we wish to cast them all away; and we hope in time, by the help of God, to be able to do it. But have patience, our friends: we hope our children will do better; and expect that once they learn to read the Great God’s Book, to go forth to their country people, to tell them the Word of Life: and by this way many will be saved from the devil’s great fire. As Mr. Jones is to be the bearer of this our Letter, we leave him to explain our case more fully. We once more beg to consider our case; and we hope you will pity us, and hear our cry we make to you, to send us a Father to reside with us here, to teach

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document 4 us, our wives and our children, The Word of God. We thank you all for what you have done for us and our children: we like the Word of Life, and we wish all our country-people should hear of it too. We all wish to let you know, as Mr. Cockran began with us, we wish him to end with us; he is now well-customed with our oily and fishy smell, and all our bad habits. We now send you our thanks for the Word of Life you have sent us; and may the Great God be kind to you all, to give you a long life, that you may do good to all the poor Indians! We feel our hearts sore when we think of you all, and those Praying-Masters that are here. We pray for you and for them; and shall still do so. Source: Thomas C. B. Boon, The Anglican Church from the Bay to the Rockies (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1962), 40–41, quoting CMS Proceedings 1838–1839, 125–26.

Document 4

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Bishop John Inglis to Archdeacon George Coster (1836) (Complete) Halifax, June 1st, 1836. To Archdeacon Coster. When I was in New Brunswick, I think I must have mentioned to you, and others of the clergy, a plan which I had suggested in the hope of interesting the laity in the affairs of the Church. It was to have one Church Society, of our own, embracing all the objects which have engaged the two great Church Societies in England; and including among those objects—aid to missions in the most neglected places, Divinity Scholarships at the Colleges—Sunday Schools. My view was to have a separate Society or Committee for each Archdeaconry, enjoying the advantages of their own funds, and all, of course, under the superintendence of the Diocesan. The Central Society in each Archdeaconry would communicate with the Bishop, and obtain books, etc. from England. I wish for a sub-committee in every parish or mission, where all possible efforts should be made to raise what can be got, regarding especially those particular objects, which the members of each particular committee may be most anxious to promote, so that by attending to the taste of the contributors the contributions may be larger. I have lately received from England, what I consider a Sanction for my plan, if we can make all its parts harmonise with the two great Church Societies, whose objects must form our limits, or we shall be in danger of running wild. I am now desirous of receiving such suggestions as yourself, and the clergy, more especially the more experienced clergy, can supply for my help. If you still think it desirable to call the clergy together, after notice of this effect, as a principal subject for their consideration, the design may be assisted by their collected exertions. We must do something. Our people must be awakened from their

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document 5 indifference and led to take an active part in the prosperity of the Church. The funds of each committee for merely local purposes may be under the entire control of that committee; but when designed for more general purposes as Missionary or Scholarship support, an aggregate should be formed in the centre or Archidiaconal Committee, who should appropriate to these purposes, with the approval of the Diocesan. Committees, however, may specially contribute towards the instruction of destitute places in their neighbourhood, or finding a promising candidate for Orders, within their own limits, may obtain and appropriate funds for his education. These are the more important of the objects which I have thought of; others may be suggested, and the more simple our whole machinery can be made, the more efficient, with God’s blessing, will be our united strength and exertions. The first missionary movements for our attempts may perhaps be confined to defraying the actual expense of visits from neighbouring missionaries to destitute settlements, but if the means be found, the employment of a visiting missionary would be a happy achievement. [signed] John Nova Scotia. Source: Maurice R. Kingsford, “Church Societies,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 7 (1965): 3–34, quotation on 11–12.

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Excerpt from Samuel Hume Blake Toronto, 1st January, 1908. The Honourable Frank Oliver, Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs. Ottawa. My dear Sir,—I thank you for sending me a copy of the report on Indian Affairs for the year 1906–7, and also of the report on schools by Dr. Bryce, which I have distributed amongst the friends who are interested in these matters. I determined to devote the first day of the new year to consideration of your yearly report, and also of a number of letters which I have received bearing on the subject, and in writing to you, although I shall not be able to post the letter to you until to-morrow. And, first, I send you very heartily all the best wishes of the season and trust that this year may be to you most prosperous—especially in connection with the Indian Department and the progress made in the care of our wards, the red men, who have given us such large value for the comparative trifles we have promised to render them back in return. There are not a few who feel very much dissatisfied in the contemplation of the position of our Indian brethren. contact with the white man is largely killing out the old-time noble qualities of the aboriginal

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document 5 inhabitants and replacing these with the vices of the white man, which so rapidly debase and must in time largely exterminate. It is better that we should thankfully recognize and fulfil our clear obligation in this matter rather than wait until, forgetting, it is beaten in upon us by the blighting of our crops, the absence of rainfall, the presence of frost, the canker worm, and disturbances in the land among the immigrants and the dissatisfied inhabitants, or other disaster justly sent down upon us. During the past five years those interested in Indian work in Manitoba, the Northwest, and British Columbia, have increasingly presented their wants to their friends in Eastern Canada. This occasioned on the part of the latter a closer investigation of the work, its needs, and the method of carrying it on, which led to the serious consideration as to whether the marvellous opening-up of the country, the presence of the ubiquitous white man, with all the vices which that brings to the Indian men and women, and the complete change in life thus compelled, do not require a readjustment of the existing state of matters, further protection of the indian, and a better preparation for the new life opened before him and which the requirements of the white man compel him to live. . . . It required some years to awaken those engaged in the Indian work to a sense of the wrong done in permitting the continuance of the non-education of the Indian men, women and children in sanitary matters, and to the absolute necessity for a more progressive and up-to-date system of education— better teachers, better buildings, better equipments, better supervision and guidance when the pupils leave the schools—more complete and common-sense provision in land, grain, cattle, and agricultural implements, nurses to care for and instruct, and hospital tents to house and separate the dying from the living. At first it was not admitted that the state of matters as described really existed. Then when acts proved the truth of the statements made it was said that it would not be wise to publish such results. But, fortunately, some were convinced that there would not be a remedy found until those interested were satisfied that the evil existed; and little by little have such facts and statistics been presented and admitted as call for immediate action, the nature of which I very earnestly hope you are now considering, and will ere long make known to the deputation that waited on you. . . . Although the principals of the boarding schools assert that ventilation is good, and that all connected with them is right, etc., yet the reverend mr. hogbin, in his remarks on the pamphlet of dr. bryce, returned to your Department, a copy of which he sent to me, makes an admission which is satisfactory to those who have been controverting these statements. It is as follows: “i do not think i can question the truth of the greater part of his statement of fact. it is true that a large percentage (much too large)

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of the pupils die either during their school life or soon afterwards. for instance, of the thirty-two blackfoot boys we have had here during our eleven years’ existence, ten are dead,” etc.. I now find that those responsible for these schools where sufficiently accurate statistics are kept do not deny a death rate of from thirty to forty per cent. I do not know what your view in connection with this matter is, but it appears to me to be a very terrible record—the more to be condemned as the usual sanitary arrangements, without which no school with us dare be kept, are almost entirely wanting. the competition of getting in pupils to earn the government grant seems to blind the heads of these institutions and to render them quite callous to the shocking results which flow from this most highly improper means of adding to the funds of their institutions. . . . The school at Alert Bay is one of those that has become a by-word. Two persons who recently visited this school stated that they were disgusted by the appearance, visible to them while paying their visit, of children covered with the evidence of tuberculosis, not only apparently fading out of life, but impregnating the whole of the school with this distemper. . . . People of experience in the work are beginning now to speak most highly of good day schools. I recently sent you a memorandum which dealt with the experience of the leaders in Indian work in the United States. They dwell not only on the work done to the pupil in the school, but the work done by the pupil when under the influence of a good teacher he returns from day to day to the reserve with his new aspirations and new life. With all best wishes, Faithfully yours, S. H. Blake Source: S. H. Blake, Don’t You Hear the Red Man Calling? (Toronto: Tyrrell, 1908).

Document 6 Report of the Indian and Eskimo Commission; Excerpt from Missionary Society of the Church in Canada, Triennial Report (1931) General Policy. As stated above the objective which your Commission have in view with regard to the future of our Indian peoples, is that of assimilating them with the general population in the capacity of members of the Christian Church and citizens of the State. To attain this objective, every effort which they are putting forth in their administrative capacity is based on the Christian principles of our religion including education, fellowship, and sympathetic understanding. In the schools under their control the children are being taught the language which they must of necessity adopt in ordinary business transactions. Strong effort is also being made to teach them the arts and crafts of the home

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document 7 and the field; how to secure a settled habitation and elevate its domestic quality; how to get well when sick and how to stay well; how to make the best use of land and the water accessible to it; how to raise the right kind of live stock; to work for a living; to desire something they can call their own as a material possession, with the happiness and comforts of family life, and a pride in the prosperity of their children. They are being taught to look upon the future as a new era, one inevitably different from the past, in which individual ambition, unaided by the show and trappings of ancient custom, must contend with the complexities and competitions of a modern world. Your Commission find that this policy has already helped to supplant nomadic habits by those of settled home conditions. It is teaching the Indian children the dignity of hard work and self reliance. It is bringing sympathy and understanding to Indian mothers and health to their offspring. It is putting hygiene into housekeeping, encouraging practical and sanitary clothing, purifying the marriage rites, revealing and inculcating the principles of Christian living, and helping to increase the Indian population. They believe that this policy of spiritual understanding and fellowship, if carefully maintained, will find a greater response from these dependent, but valorous people than any other that could be formulated. The policy itself, if rightly pursued, and if attended with the results contemplated, will gradually lead to the Indian’s release from their present position of wardship under the Dominion Government, to be followed by unrestricted citizenship based on competency. The method of determining competency has yet to be revealed, but it is evident that education and demonstrated ability should be regarded as pre-requisites. Christian and patriotic duty alike urge Church and State to give the Red Man his due, and a steady and progressive programme of advance should be adopted. The time has fully come when the Indian can no longer be looked upon as an interesting relic of the past, or an ornament for a museum. He must be looked upon as a prospective citizen with a valuable contribution to make to the body politic of the country and your Commission are convinced the Indian Residential School system will be one of the most effective instruments in accomplishing this desirable end. t. b. r. westgate, Field Secretary, M.S.C.C. Source: General Synod Journal (1931), Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada Appendix, 56–58.

Document 7 Excerpts from Anglican Primates and Metropolitans, Toronto Statement on “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence” (1963) Meeting for the first time since Lambeth 1958, we have spent two weeks considering the present needs and duties of our churches in every part of the

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document 7 world. Representing every province and region, we have spoken to each other deeply, of our situation, of what God has done and is doing in our world and our church, and of the unexplored frontiers which we now face. We might measure all this in terms of emergency, of the critical needs for money and manpower needed even to keep the Church alive in many areas. These needs are absolute, measurable and commanding. It is our conviction, however, that to interpret our present situation only in those terms would be wrong. What those needs prove is not our poverty. They prove that the ideas, the pictures we have of one another and of our common life in Christ, are utterly obsolete and irrelevant to our actual situation. It is a platitude to say that in our time, areas of the world which have been thought of as dependent and secondary are suddenly striding to the centre of the stage, in a new and breath-taking independence and self-reliance. Equally has this happened to the Church. In our time the Anglican Communion has come of age. Our professed nature as a world-wide fellowship of national and regional churches has suddenly become a reality—all but ten of the 350 Anglican dioceses are now included in self-governing churches, of one blood with their own self-governing regions and peoples. The full communion in Christ which has been our traditional tie has suddenly taken on a totally new dimension. It is now irrelevant to talk of “giving” and “receiving” churches. The keynotes of our time are equality, interdependence, mutual responsibility. Three central truths at the heart of our faith command us in this: The Church’s mission is response to the living God who in his love creates, reveals, judges, redeems, fulfils. It is he who moves through our history to teach and to save, who calls us to receive his love, to learn, to obey and follow. Our unity in Christ, expressed in our full communion, is the most profound bond among us, in all our political and racial and cultural diversity. The time has fully come when this unity and interdependence must find a completely new level of expression and corporate obedience. Our need is not therefore simply to be expressed in greater generosity by those who have money and men to spare. Our need is rather to understand how God has led us, through the sometimes painful history of our time, to see the gifts of freedom and communion in their great terms, and to live up to them. If we are not responsible stewards of what Christ has given us, we will lose even what we have. . . . In the face of these necessities, we propose the following program to every church of the Anglican Communion, without exception: First, that it join—as each church chooses—in our immediate commitment for increased support in money and manpower, through existing or new channels, in co-operation with the other churches of our Communion. Clearly each church must set its own time, goal and methods. But in many parts of

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document 7 the world we have little time left for this kind of partnership—some doors have already closed. Second, that each church begin at once a radical study of its own obedience to mission. Included in this should be a study of its structures, of its theology of mission, and of its priorities in decision. We need to ask whether our structures are appropriate to our world and the church as it is, and if not, how they should be changed. We need to examine the training of laity and clergy alike, asking whether in fact God’s mission is central in our teaching. We need to examine rigorously the senses in which we use the word “mission” as describing something we do for somebody else. We need to examine our priorities, asking whether in fact we are not putting secondary needs of our own ahead of essential needs of our brothers. A new organ in Lagos or New York, for example, might mean that twelve fewer priests are trained in Asia or Latin America. Inherited institutions in India or England may actually have outlived their usefulness but be still depriving us of trained teachers in the South Pacific or Uganda. Third, that every church seek the way to receive as well as give, asking expectantly what other churches and cultures may bring to its life, and eager to share its tasks and problems with others. Full communion means either very little, if it be taken as a mere ceremonial symbol, or very much if it be understood as an expression of our common life and fortune. We all stand or fall together, for we are one in Christ. Therefore we must seek to receive and to share. Fourth, that every church seek to test and evaluate every activity in its life by the test of mission and of service to others, in our following after Christ. The Church is not a club or an association of like-minded and congenial people. Nor is our Communion, named for its historic roots, a federation commissioned to propagate an English-speaking culture across the world. If our Anglican churches are guilty of presenting such a picture of ourselves, and we are, it is because we regard our own perpetuation and tradition as the end of our duty. The Church exists to witness, to obey and to serve. All our planning must be tested by this. Finally, every church needs to develop swiftly every possible channel for communication with its companions in the Anglican Communion—indeed in the Church of Christ as a whole. This is not merely a matter of the printed word or occasional visits. It is a matter of deep and deliberate involvement in one another’s affairs and life. It means the reorientation of much of our teaching in parishes. It means a radical change in the structure of our prayers. It means massive exchange programs of men and women in different categories. It means a host of designed ways by which our common life and mutual interdependence may be expressed. . . . We are aware that such a program as we propose, if it is seen in its true size and accepted, will mean the death of much that is familiar about our churches now. It will mean radical change in our priorities—even leading us to share with

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document 8 others at least as much as we spend on ourselves. It means the death of old isolations and inherited attitudes. It means a willingness to forego many desirable things, in every church. In substance, what we are really asking is the rebirth of the Anglican Communion, which means the death of many old things but—infinitely more—the birth of entirely new relationships. We regard this as the essential task before the churches of the Anglican Communion now. Source: Anglican Congress 1963, Report of Proceedings, 117–22.

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Michael Peers, “Message to the National Native Convocation,” Minaki, Ont., Aug. 6, 1993 (Complete) My Brothers and Sisters: Together here with you I have listened as you have told your stories of the residential schools. I have heard the voices that have spoken of pain and hurt experienced in the schools, and of the scars which endure to this day. I have felt shame and humiliation as I have heard of suffering inflicted by my people, and as I think of the part our church played in that suffering. I am deeply conscious of the sacredness of the stories that you have told amd I hold in the highest honour those who have told them. I have heard with admiration the stories of people and communities who have worked at healing, and I am aware of how much healing is needed. I also know that I am in need of healing, and my own people are in need of healing, and our church is in need of healing. Without that healing, we will continue the same attitudes that have done such damage in the past. I also know that healing takes a long time, both for people and for communities. I also know that it is God who heals, and that God can begin to heal when we open ourselves, our wounds, our failures and our shame to God. I want to take one step along that path here and now. I accept and I confess before God and you, our failures in the residential schools. We failed you. We failed ourselves. We failed God. I am sorry, more than I can say, that we were part of a system which took you and your children from home and family. I am sorry, more than I can say, that we tried to remake you in our image, taking from you your language and the signs of your identity. I am sorry, more than I can say, that in our schools so many were abused physically, sexually, culturally and emotionally. On behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada, I present our apology. I do this at the desire of those in the Church like the National Executive Council, who know some of your stories and have asked me to apologize. I do

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this in the name of many who do not know these stories. And I do this even though there are those in the church who cannot accept the fact that these things were done in our name. As soon as I am home, I shall tell all the bishops what I have said, and ask them to co-operate with me and with the National Executive Council in helping this healing at the local level. Some bishops have already begun this work. I know how often you have heard words which have been empty because they have not been accompanied by actions. I pledge to you my best efforts, and the efforts of our church at the national level, to walk with you along the path of God’s healing. The work of the Residential Schools Working Group, the video, the commitment and the effort of the Special Assistants to the Primate for this work, the grants available for healing conferences, are some signs of that pledge, and we shall work for others. This is Friday, the day of Jesus’ suffering and death. It is the anniversary of the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima, one of the most terrible injuries ever inflicted by one people on another. But even atomic bombs and Good Friday are not the last word. God raised Jesus from the dead as a sign that life and wholeness are the everlasting and unquenchable purpose of God. Thank you for listening to me. ✠ Michael Archbishop and Primate Response to the Primate at the National Native Convocation, delivered by Vi Smith on behalf of the elders and participants Minaki, Ont., Saturday, August 7, 1993 On behalf of this gathering, we acknowledge and accept the apology that the Primate has offered on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada. It was offered from his heart with sincerity, sensitivity, compassion and humility. We receive it in the same manner. We offer praise and thanks to our Creator for his courage. We know it wasn’t easy. Let us keep him in our hearts and prayers, that God will continue to give him the strength and courage to continue with his tasks. Source: Available at accessed on July 15, 2003.

Document 9 Sections I–III of the Nova Scotia Act of 1758 An Act for the establishment of religious Public Worship in this Province, and for suppressing Popery. Forasmuch as His Majesty upon the settlement of the Province, was pleased, in his pious concern for the advancement of God’s glory, and the more decent celebration of the divine ordinances amongst us, to erect a Church for religious wor-

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document 9 ship, according to the usage of the Church of England; in humble imitation of his Royal example, and for the more effectual attainment of his Majesty’s pious intentions, that we might in the exercise of religious duties, be seeking for the divine favor and protection, be it therefor enacted by his Excellency the Governor, Council and Assembly, That the sacred rites and ceremonies of divine worship, according to the liturgy of the Church established by the laws of England, shall be deemed the fixed form of worship amongst us, and the place wherein such liturgy shall be used, shall be respected and known by the name of the Church of England as by law established. And that for the preservation of purity and unity of doctrine and discipline in the church, and the right administration of the sacraments, no minister shall be admitted to officiate as a minister of the Church of England, but such as shall produce to the Governor, a testimonial, that he hath been licenced by the Bishop of London, and shall publickly declare his assent and consent to the book of common prayer, and shall subscribe to be conformable to the orders and constitutions of the Church of England, and the laws there established; upon which the Governor is hereby requested to induct the said minister into any parish that shall make presentation of him. And if any other person presenting himself a minister of the Church of England, shall, contrary to this act, presume to teach or preach publicly or privately, the Governor and Council are hereby desired and empowered to suspend and silence the person so offending. II. Provided nevertheless, and it is the true intent and meaning of this act, that Protestants, dissenting from the Church of England, whether they be Calvinists, Lutherans, Quakers, or under what denomination soever, shall have free liberty of conscience, and may erect and build meeting houses for public worship, and may choose and elect ministers for the carrying on divine service and administration of the sacraments, according to their several opinions; and all contracts made between their ministers and their congregations for the support of the ministry, are hereby declared valid, and shall have their full force and effect, according to the tenor and conditions thereof; and all such Dissenters shall be excused from any rates or taxes to be made and levied for the support of the established Church of England. III. And be it further enacted, That every popish person, exercising any ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and every popish priest or person exercising the function of a popish priest, shall depart out of this province on or before the twenty-fifth day of March, 1759. And if any such person or persons shall be found in this province after the said day, he or they shall, upon conviction, be adjudged to suffer perpetual imprisonment: and if any person or persons so imprisoned, shall escape out of prison he or they shall be deemed and adjudged guilty of felony without benefit of clergy. . . . Source: Statutes of Nova Scotia, 32 Geo. 2 c. 5.

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Excerpt from Royal Instructions to Governor James Murray, Quebec, December 7, 1763 With these Our instructions you will receive our commission under our Great Seal of Great Britain constituting you our Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over Our Province of Quebec in America. . . . 33. And to the End that the Church of England may be established both in Principle and Practice, and that the said Inhabitants may by Degrees be induced to embrace the Protestant Religion, and their Children be brought up in the Principles of it; We do hereby declare it to be Our Intention, when the said Province shall have been accurately surveyed, and divided into Townships, Districts, Precincts or Parishes, in such manner as shall be hereinafter directed, all possible Encouragement shall be given to the erecting Protestant Schools in the said Districts, Townships and Precincts, by settling, appointing and allotting proper Quantities of Land for that Purpose, and also for a Glebe and Maintenance for a Protestant Minister and Protestant Masters; and you are to consider and report to Us, by Our Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, by what other Means the Protestant Religion may be promoted, established and encouraged in Our Province under your Government. 34. And You are to take especial Care, that God Almighty be devoutly and duly served throughout your Government, the Book of Common Prayer, as by Law established, read each Sunday and Holyday, and the blessed Sacrament administered according to the Rites of the Church of England. 35. You are not to prefer any Protestant Minister to any Ecclesiastical Benefice in the Province under your Government, without a Certificate from the Right Reverend Father in God the Lord Bishop of London, of his being conformable to the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England, and of a good Life and Conversation; And if any Person hereafter preferred to a Benefice shall appear to you to give Scandal, either by his Doctrine or Manners, you are to use the best Means for his Removal. 36. You are to give Orders forthwith, that every Orthodox Minister within your Government be one of the Vestry in his respective Parish; and that no Vestry be held without him, except in case of Sickness, or, after Notice of a Vestry summoned, he omit to come. 37. And to the End that the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction of the Lord Bishop of London may take place in Our Province under your Government, as far as conveniently may be, We do think fit, that You give all Countenance and Encouragement to the Exercise of the same, excepting only the collating to Benefices, granting Licences of Marriage, and Probates of Wills, which We have reserved to You, Our Governor, and to the Commander in Chief of Our said Province for the Time being.

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document 11 38. And We do further direct, that no Schoolmaster, who shall arrive in Our said Province from this Kingdom, be henceforward permitted to keep School, without a Licence of the said Lord Bishop of London; and that no other Person now there that shall come from other Parts, shall be admitted to keep School in your Government without your Licence first obtained. 39. And You are to take especial Care, that a Table of Marriages, established by the Canons of the Church of England, be hung up in all Places of publick Worship according to the Rites of the Church of England. 40. And it is Our further Will and Pleasure, that, in order to suppress, as much as in you lies, every Species of Vice and Immorality, You forthwith, do cause all Laws already made against Blasphemy, Profaneness, Adultery, Fornication, Polygamy, Incest, Profanation of the Lord’s Day, Swearing and Drunkenness, to be vigorously put in Execution in every part of your Government; And that you take due Care for the Punishment of these, and every other Vice and Immorality, by Presentment upon Oath to be made to the Temporal Courts, by the Church Wardens of the several Parishes, at proper Times of the year to be appointed for that Purpose; and, for the further Discouragement of Vice, and Encouragement of Virtue and good living, (that by such Examples the Infidels may be invited and persuaded to embrace the Christian Religion,) You are not to admit any Persons to publick Trusts and Employments in the Province under your Government, whose Ill-Fame and Conversation may occasion Scandal. Source: Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759–1791, pt. 1, 2d ed. [Ottawa: Taché, 1918], 181–205.

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Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe to Henry Dundas, November 1792 (Complete) Navy Hall, Niagara, 6th November, 1792. Sir, In my general letter, descriptive of the Legislative Council and House of Assembly, I did myself the honor of intimating to you the necessity there was for a Bill to make valid Marriages that had been contracted in Upper Canada, and of providing for them in future; I enclose a Bill, framed for that purpose, by Chief Justice Osgoode, which I must beg that His Majesty’s Ministers will take into their early consideration. I also subjoin a Report on this Subject submitted to me by Mr. Cartwright; but I cannot omit this Opportunity of most sincerely and anxiously requesting the attention of His Majesty’s Ministers to the Ecclesiastical State of this Province. I have no reason to alter those opinions on this Subject, which I humbly submitted to the consideration of His Majesty’s Ministers, previous to my leaving Europe. I need not, I am sure, Sir, observe that the best security, that all just Gov-

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document 11 ernment has for its existence is founded on the Morality of the People, and that such Morality has no true Basis but when placed upon religious Principles; it is therefore that I have always been extremely anxious, both from political as well as more worthy motives that the Church of England should be essentially established in Upper Canada, and I must be permitted to say, Sir, I received the greatest satisfaction from your expression: “that you did not think that Government complete without a Protestant Bishop,” as I conceive such an Institution necessary to the support of the experiment that is now making, whether the British Government cannot support itself by its own Superiority in this distant part of the World. I beg, Sir, to observe to you the sources from whence a Protestant Clergy shall arise, seem totally to be prevented by the want of the Episcopal Function in this Province, on the one hand, the distance and situation of Nova Scotia render it less practicable that any Candidates for Ordination should have recourse to the Bishop of that Diocese, than to those of England or Ireland; and on the other, those who have been ordained by the Bishops in the United States, are by an Act of Parliament incapacitated from performing any duty in Upper Canada—but did the situation of the Province, in this respect, degrading as it would be to the Church of England, end merely in the Privation of its Office and Benefits, it might not be of such infinite political importance as the room that is hereby made for the introduction of every kind of Sectaries many of whom are hostile and none congenial to the British Constitution. I am perfectly aware of the great necessity that there is of guarding against any unnecessary Expence, in the further Establishment of this Country, yet I cannot but consider that it would be the worst and most disabling of all Economy to lose the great opportunity that is now open, of forming the Character, Temper, and Manners of the People of this infant Colony to British Habits and to British Principles, and this I think may be done comparatively at little Expence—the great Body of Puritans in America, however misrepresented, draw their Origin from the Church of England, and are nearer to it in their religious Belief and Customs, than they are to any other sects, or religious Descriptions; the state of Poverty in which they must for some time remain after their Emigration will naturally prevent them from the possibility of supporting their Ministers by public subscription; in the mean while, the Government has it in its Power immediately to provide for any Protestant Clergyman, in the separate Townships, by giving him a reasonable landed property, in perpetuity, for himself and family, and entrusting him with the care of that Seventh which is to be reserved for the Protestant Clergy; under these circumstances, it is probable that the Sons of respectable Settlers would offer themselves for Ordination, and tho’ they might not in the first instance have the Learning of the European Clergy, their Habits and Morals might as essentially promote the interests of the Community. It is by these means, Sir, that the Influence of the Protestant Clergy may extend and encrease with the rapid Growth and Value of those Lands which are

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document 12 reserved for their Maintenance and which without a due attention being paid, in this respect, will naturally be considered by the People at large, as detrimental to the Colony, and may at no very great distant period of time, become a temptation to those, who shall be hostile to the Union of Upper Canada with Great Britain. I have the honour to be, Sir, with great Respect your most obedient and most humble Servant. J. Graves Simcoe. To The Right Honourable Henry Dundas, One of His Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State, &c., &c. London. Source: John Graves Simcoe, Correspondence, ed. E. A. Cruikshank. Vol. 1, 1789–1793 [Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1923], 251–52.

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Excerpt from a sermon by Charles Inglis, “The Duty of Honouring the King,” January 30, 1780 I Peter, II. 17: Fear God. Honour the King. Such is the concise, nervous and commanding style in which the Apostle enforces those two important duties. He connects the respectful honour and obedience we owe to our Sovereign, with that filial, reverential fear which is due to our creator; not only because they are characteristic of a real Christian, and should be inseparable; but because our welfare, peace and happiness, temporal and eternal, depend on the discharge of them. It is worthy of observation, that these duties are often joined together in other passages of sacred writ, in the Old as well as New Testament. Thus Solomon exhorts,—“My Son, fear thou the Lord and the King, and meddle not with them that are given to change.” And he immediately subjoins a weighty reason for the exhortation. “For,” says he, “their calamity shall rise suddenly; and who knoweth the ruin of them both?” Prov. xxiv. 21, 22. . . . This serves to point out the close connection between those duties; it also places our obligation to “Honour the King” in a striking light, however it may be disregarded by some people. Duties which God hath thus united and joined together, no man should ever presume to put asunder. The tragical event which we are enjoined by our Church to commemorate this day [the execution of King Charles I], naturally suggests the consideration of this subject—particularly the latter part of it, honouring the King. A failure in this duty did once involve our nation in all the horrors of rebellion and civil war. To such lengths did the phrenzy of enthusiasm, and republican ambition push on the sons of rebellion at that period, that they imbrued their hands in

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the blood of their most excellent Sovereign; thereby entailing guilt on our nation, and staining our history with indelible infamy. . . . Nero was Emperor of Rome when St. Peter wrote this Catholic epistle; and notwithstanding the vicious character of that prince, he delivers the precept in my text—“honour the King.” This was to be a general rule for all Christians. The personal character of the magistrate was not to interfere with the civil duty of the subject: even when bad, it did not dissolve the obligation of the latter— were the contrary principle admitted, it must necessarily and daily fill the world with confusion and disorder. The Christian therefore, is here injoined to honour the person who is vested with legal authority, and whom the providence of God hath placed over him. . . . It may be proper to observe further, that this duty is not confined to those who live under any one particular form of government: it extends to the subjects of all regular states, lawfully established. That some forms of government are preferable to others, cannot be doubted; yet neither our Saviour, nor his Apostles have decided where that preference is due. This was foreign to their design. . . . But if men will not regard this precept from a principle of conscience, and because it is the will of God; yet at least for their own sake they should do so: for on a due observation of it, the stability of government and the peace of societies depend; and in these, it may be affirmed, the happiness of individuals is involved. This unquestionably is the case in our government, where all are under the protection of equal laws; and no subject can labour under any grievance for which the law and constitution have not provided a remedy. . . . Source: Excerpt from Charles Inglis, The Duty of Honouring the King Explained and Recommended in a Sermon, Preached in St. George’s and St. Paul’s Chapels, New-York, on Sunday, January 30, 1780, Being the Anniversary of the Martyrdom of King Charles I. Microform copy in Early American Imprints, series 1 (1639–1800). [Worcester, Mass.]: American Antiquarian Society, [1956–64?], no. 16810, and available online from Project Canterbury accessed July 15, 2003.

Document 13 Loyalists’ letter of 1783 (Complete)

New York, March 21st, 1783. Sir,—In conformity to your Excellency’s desire, we now lay before you the following plan for an episcopate in Nova Scotia, and please ourselves with the prospect of its succeeding under your Excellency’s patronage. The plan is simply this, viz.: That a Bishop be consecrated in England and sent to reside in Nova Scotia, to have the superintendence of the clergy, to ordain candidates for holy orders, and to confirm such of the laity there as shall desire confirmation, but not to be

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document 13 invested with any temporal power or authority whatever. In support of this plan we think many strong reasons may be adduced, and against it, as we conceive, no objections of consequence can be made. Permit us to mention as concisely as possible, the following reasons why our request should be complied with. 1. Unless an episcopate be granted, the Church of England will be in a more disadvantageous situation in Nova Scotia than any other denomination of christians. This has ever been the case of the church in the colonies. Other societies of christians have had their constitution compleat and could reap every advantage of which it was capable in the management of it, while the Church of England could do little at any time without the special direction of her superiors at home, and before their direction could be obtained the opportunity was lost. 2. The proposed episcopate will supply the province of Nova Scotia with a sufficient number of clergymen of the established church, and without it their number will never be equal to the wants of the inhabitants, should they increase in proportion, as other colonies formerly have done. While orders are only to be had in England, the danger of the sea, the expense of the voyage, and the difficulty of transacting business among strangers, will ever, as it ever has done, discourage the greater part of those gentlemen who would go into orders, if the danger, expense and difficulty attending a voyage to England could be avoided. We do know that many, nearly a fourth part, of those who have encountered this danger have lost their lives in the attempt. We also know that many have been obliged to incur debts on this occasion, which the scanty subsistence they were obliged to return to, has scarcely enabled them to discharge in many years—to this also it has, in a great measure, been owing that while dissenters have had ministers enough to satisfy every demand, and even to crowd into every place where they could possibly support themselves, the church has never had clergymen enough to supply the larger towns, and when any vacancy has happened, it has been so long before another incumbent could be procured, that the congregation has in a manner been dispersed and the labors of his predecessor nearly lost. 3. The fixing of a bishop in Nova Scotia and the consequent supply of clergymen, will strengthen the attachment and confirm the loyalty of the inhabitants, and promote the settlement of the province. It is a point of great importance in civil society that the people should be attached to the state by means of its religion, for where they find that proper attention is paid to their spiritual concerns by their governors, they will have a stronger affection for that government than if they were left destitute of all religious instruction but such as they could provide for themselves. Particularly with regard to Nova Scotia. It being an object of importance to Great Britain to have that province effectually settled, it must also be an object of importance to retain the inhabitants in their loyalty. To accomplish this end it appears to us absolutely necessary to establish the constitution of the Church of England among them fully by sending a bishop to reside there.

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document 14 The inhabitants of that country are, and those that shall in future go thither as settlers, will be made up people of various religious persuasions. If the service of the church be made the most convenient for them by supplying them with ministers as fast as they are wanted, they will almost universally become members of the church, and under its influence will be more strongly attached to the British Government than they would be under any other mode of worship. To this plan of an episcopate in Nova Scotia we think no reasonable objection could be made. Should it, however, be thought exceptionable either as an expensive or an unseasonable establishment, to the former we answer:—That although we wish a decent and permanent support to be provided for the bishop, yet we think it may be done without any burden, either to the people of the province or to the nation, a portion of the unlocated lands in the province may be appropriated to that purpose, which in future time would answer the end, and in the meantime we understand that the society for the propagation of the gospel has a fund appropriated to the support of American bishops more than adequate to the support of a bishop in Nova Scotia. As to the second objection, that the plan which we propose is unseasonable, while the nation is engaged in war, &c., We beg leave to observe that the clergy of most of the colonies have been soliciting the appointment of American bishops at different times, for many years past, and the answer ever has been that the present time was not a proper one, but a more favorable opportunity must be waited for. But as we apprehend that the nation is now on the verge of peace, we conceive no time more proper can ever present itself for the fixing of such an establishment than the present, and we are sure that the influence of such an establishment will never be more useful than now, when so large an accession of inhabitants is to be made to that province. We have the honor to be your Excellency’s most obedient, humble servants, Charles Inglis, Samuel Seabury, [and sixteen others] To His Excellency Sir Guy Carleton, &c., &c. Source: Nova Scotia Historical Society, Collections 6 [1887–88]: 130–33.

Document 14 Excerpts from Letters Patent Appointing Charles Inglis Bishop of Nova Scotia, August 1787 George the Third, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. To all to whom these Presents shall come.

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document 14 greeting: whereas the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England are professed and observed by a very considerable part of our loving subjects of the Province of Nova-Scotia, and its Dependencies in North America; And whereas, by an Act passed in the year 1758, by the Governor, Council, and Assembly of the said Province of Nova-Scotia, it is enacted, that the sacred Rites and Ceremonies of Divine Worship, according to the Liturgy of the Church, established by the Laws of England, shall be deemed the fixed Form of Worship within the said Province; And whereas the Churches of the said Province are not, without great difficulty, supplied with Ministers duly Ordained, and the people thereof are deprived of some offices prescribed by the Liturgy and Usage of the Church of England, for want of a Bishop residing in the said Province: For remedy of the aforesaid inconveniences and defects, We have determined to erect the aforesaid Province into a Bishop’s See; and we do, by these Presents, erect, found, ordain, make, and constitute the said Province of Nova-Scotia, and its Dependencies, to be a Bishop’s See, and to be called from henceforth the Bishoprick of Nova-Scotia, and its Dependencies: And to the end that this our intention may be carried into due effect, We, having great confidence in the Learning, Morals, Probity, and Prudence of our well-beloved Charles Inglis, D.D., do name and appoint him to be Bishop of the said See of Nova-Scotia, and its Dependencies, so that he, the said Reverend Charles Inglis, shall be, and be taken to be, Bishop of the Bishop’s See of Nova-Scotia, and its Dependencies, and may, by virtue of this our nomination and appointment, enter into and possess the said Bishop’s See, as the Bishop thereof, during his natural life, without any let or impediment of Us, our Heirs or Successors. And we do, by these Presents, give and grant to the said Charles Inglis, and his Successors, Bishops of Nova-Scotia, and its Dependencies, full power and authority to confer the Orders of Deacon and Priest, to confirm those that are Baptised and come to years of discretion, and to perform all the other functions peculiar and appropriated to the Office of a Bishop; such Bishop, and his Successors, having been first duly Ordained or Consecrated Bishops, according to the Form prescribed by the Liturgy of the Church of England, and also by him or themselves, or by his or their Commissary or Commissaries, to be by him or them substituted and appointed to exercise jurisdiction, Spiritual and Ecclesiastical, in and throughout the said See and Diocese, according to the Laws and Canons of the Church of England, which are lawfully made and received in England, in the several causes and matters hereafter in these Presents expressed and specified, and no other. And for declaration of our Royal Will, concerning the special causes and matters in which we will that the aforesaid jurisdiction shall be exercised, We have further given and granted, and do, by these Presents, give and grant to the aforesaid Bishop, and his Successors, full power and authority, by him or them-

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document 14 selves, or by his or their sufficient Commissary or Commissaries, by him or them to be substituted and named, to give Institution to Benefices, and grant Licenses to Curates, and to visit all Rectors, Curates, Ministers, and Incumbents of all the Churches within the said Diocese, wherein Divine Service shall be celebrated, according to the Rites and Liturgy of the Church of England, and all Priests and Deacons in Holy Orders of the Church of England, resident in their said Diocese, with all, and all manner of jurisdiction, power, and coercion, Ecclesiastical, that may be requisite in the premises; as also to call before him or them, or his or their Commissary or Commissaries, at such competent days, hours, and places whatsoever, when, and as often, as to him or them, or his or their Commissary or Commissaries shall seem meet and convenient, the aforesaid Rectors, Curates, Ministers, Incumbents, Priests, or Deacons in Holy Orders of the Church of England, or any of them, and to enquire by witnesses, to be sworn in due form of Law, by him or them, or his or their Commissary or Commissaries, and by all other lawful ways and means by which the same may, by Law, be best and most effectually done, as well concerning their morals as their behaviour in their said Offices and Stations, respectively, as also to administer all such Oaths as are accustomed to be taken in Ecclesiastical Courts; and to punish and correct the aforesaid Rectors, Curates, Ministers, Incumbents, Priests, and Deacons, in Holy Orders of the Church of England, according to their demerits, whether by removal, deprivation, suspension, or other such Ecclesiastical censure or correction, as they may be liable to, according the Canons and Laws, Ecclesiastical, aforesaid. . . . Moreover, we Will and Ordain, by these Presents, that the Bishop of the See of Nova-Scotia, and his Successors, shall be subject and subordinate to the Archiepiscopal See of the Province of Canterbury, and to the Most Reverend Father in God, John, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England and Metropolitan, and his Successors, in the same manner as any Bishop of any See within the Province of Canterbury, in our Kingdom of England, is under the authority of the aforesaid Archiepiscopal See of Canterbury, and the Archbishop thereof, save and except in the matter of Appeals from Judgments, Decrees, or Sentences, pronounced by the said Bishop of Nova Scotia, or his Successors, which We Will shall not be made to the said Archbishop of Canterbury, or to his Courts, but to Commissioners appointed by Us, or our Successors, in manner aforesaid. And to the end, that all the matters and things aforesaid, may have their due effect, We do hereby signify to the Most Reverend Father in Christ, John, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of England and Metropolitan, that We have erected and founded the aforesaid Episcopal See of Nova-Scotia, and have named and preferred our beloved Charles Inglis to the said Bishoprick, and have appointed him the Bishop and Ordinary Pastor thereof, requiring, and by the Faith and Love whereby he is bound unto Us, commanding him to consecrate the aforesaid Charles Inglis Bishop of Nova-Scotia, in manner accustomed, and

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document 15 diligently to do and perform all other things appertaining to his Office in this behalf, with effect. And further, to the end that all the other things aforesaid may be firmly holden and done, We Will also, and, by these Presents, grant unto the aforesaid Charles Inglis, that he may and shall have Our Letters Patent, duly made and sealed, under our Great Seal of Great Britain, without fine or fee, great or small, to be in any manner rendered, done, or paid to Us, in our Hanaper, or elsewhere, to our use. In witness whereof, We have caused these our Letters to be made Patent. Witness Ourself, at Westminster, the 9th day of August, 1787, in the 27th year of Our Reign By Writ of Privy Seal, york. Registered the 31st January, 1788, (Signed) Rich. Bulkeley. Source: C. W. Vernon, Bicentenary Sketches [Halifax: Chronicle Printing, 1910], 248–52.

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Excerpts from John Strachan, “A Sermon Preached at York, Upper Canada, Third of July, 1825, on the Death of the Late Lord Bishop of Quebec” 2nd. St. Peter, 1st Chap. 15th Verse. I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease, to have these things always in remembrance. In this Epistle, the Apostle seeks, with great earnestness, to confirm the Christian converts in the belief of that Gospel, which he had so faithfully preached. . . . This Epistle, is therefore a legacy to the Christians of all ages. It is the appeal of a beloved friend, to the best affections of their hearts—the last memorial of a faithful instructor, entirely forgetful of himself, and employing the last moments of his life in confirming them in the faith. There is something refreshing and sublime in recurring to the primitive age of Christianity—in beholding twelve poor and friendless men stepping forward to evangelize the world.—An object so vast could never have been conceived, had it not been suggested by the Holy Spirit, to minds prepared for its reception, by our blessed Saviour. . . . The disciples of Christ, therefore, had no worldly prospect of advantage or enjoyment before them—but if there was no prospect of benefit, the difficulties and dangers were certain and immediate, and included all the evils, which malignity, bigotry, and persecution could inflict. . . . They carried their unwelcome doctrine into all parts of the world—they traversed with cheerfulness the most inhospitable countries—they sailed through storms and tempests, undismayed by the war of elements, and rejoiced amidst their weariness and their labours, in being deemed worthy to proclaim pardon and peace to a benighted world. The nations were awakened from the sleep of death, as the words of eter-

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document 15 nal life flowed from the Apostles’ lips,—the temples of superstition were shut or destroyed, and churches were planted in every part of the civilized world. . . . In applying this subject to the melancholy event, which has deprived this Diocese of its venerable Bishop, we presume not to compare him with the blessed Apostle, of whom we have been speaking. There are nevertheless some circumstances in which they may be associated. St. Peter was the first Apostle who preached the Gospel, and our late Bishop was the first successor of the Apostles appointed to superintend, govern, and extend the infant Protestant Church in this Colony. At his Lordship’s last visitation, he intimated to his Clergy, that from his advanced stage of life, and the growing infirmities of age, he had little prospect of ever being again able to undertake a journey through his extensive Diocese. The charge which he then delivered to them, as well as to the Churches over which they preside, may be therefore considered his parting admonition, and while we treasure it up in our hearts, as the last words of an affectionate friend, we are naturally induced to look back to the period of his Lordship’s arrival in Canada, and to consider what progress the Church has made under his administration. Let us then follow him as we have done the holy Apostle in his ministerial progress. On dividing the Province of Quebec into two distinct Governments, our late venerable Sovereign signified to his Parliament his intention of making provision for a Protestant Clergy, according to the Church of England, by which the people might enjoy all the benefits of religious instruction—rightly judging that the establishment of an enlightened Clergy in the Colony would contribute more than any other measure to its happiness and prosperity. To follow up this pious and benevolent measure, and to meet the wants of the rising Church with more ease and convenience, by rendering it unnecessary for young men, desirous of entering her ministry, to proceed to England for Holy Orders, as well as to perform those Episcopal functions, which are necessary to her very existence, a Bishop was appointed, retaining the former name of the Colony, that both Provinces might be included in the Diocese. For this arduous chore Dr. Mountain, then a Dignitary in the Church of England, was most judiciously selected. This gentleman had taken his degrees at the University, with great distinction, and from his elegance of taste, extensive literary acquirements, and private worth, had been rapidly preferred. The friend of the great Mr. Pitt, and of the present Bishop of Winchester so justly revered as the champion of the true faith, the brightest prospects were opened to his view. . . . When the late Bishop was appointed, about thirty-two years ago, to diffuse the light of the Gospel through this extensive portion of His Majesty’s dominions, it was even a greater spiritual, than a natural wilderness. Only five Protestant Congregations were to be found within the whole diocese; where now, upwards of fifty are established. In so long a period, this may appear a small increase; but great and many were the obstacles which the Church had to encounter, some of which could only be removed by time, and over others, the

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document 15 Bishop had no control. . . . In this age of affected liberality and abhorrence of restraint, our venerable Church has peculiar difficulties to surmount, in establishing herself in a new country like this, which those societies, that adopt no form of Church Government under the pretext that forms are not sanctioned by the primitive times, never can experience. But in proportion to the difficulties, which she has to overcome at her commencement, is the permanence of her establishment, and certainty of her extension, for while the members of other denominations connected by no bond of union, no common principles of order, and no subordination, are soon scattered, or divided, our Church proceeds, with all the advantages, which union, discipline, and order can produce. Her Government justly claims a divine origin, sanctioned by the authority, and practice of the Apostles, which is the law of Christ. The vigilance of the Bishops, animated by zeal, and tempered with discretion, produces the greatest benefits. The inferior clergy feel the responsibility of their situation, and learn from experience that they are placed under a real and not a nominal inspection, and that they are acting under a watchful shepherd, whose voice will rouse them, if slothful, or punish them if negligent. The form of prayer, which we are bound to use, unites all the congregations of our Church in the principal part of their worship, as if they were only one congregation and assembled in the same temple, and it presents to them with great force simplicity and beauty, the ways, means and appointments of God, to restore our fallen nature to purity, and everlasting life. Without a liturgy, or regular form of prayer, no church can continue long. . . . With a pure Government, and a still purer form of prayer, there is in our Church no discordance in doctrine, precept, or discipline. . . . On arriving in his Diocese, the Bishop found many things combining to blight the prospects of the rising church. The majority of the inhabitants of Lower Canada, where his Lordship determined to reside, belonged to the Roman Catholic persuasion and looked upon him as the head of a rival Ecclesiastical establishment. The Protestant dissenters, who composed a considerable number of the remainder, envied and opposed him, because the Church over which he presided, was the religion of the State, and was therefore more immediately under its protection. To soften the asperity of the opposition of these two classes and the undisguised hatred of inferior Sects, and to shew them the real excellence of the Church of England, happily placed in the true medium between extravagant and dangerous extremes, could only be the work of time. His Lordship had also the mortification to find that many of the Protestant inhabitants, imbibing the levelling opinions of the times, declaimed against the appointment of a Bishop and against all religious establishments, as inconsistent with the spirit of true religion and the peace of society. Had not Christianity been revealed, then had mankind been left to follow their own imaginations, as they did before the coming of Christ, but as the Supreme Being has been pleased to communicate his will, it is the duty of every Christian Government, to support such a religious establishment, as may best secure the benefits of this revelation to

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document 15 all their subjects. Now, as this divine revelation is intended to promote among all men true morality and purity of life, to become the mother of good works, our cordial in affliction, and our comfort in death, to bring us daily into the presence of God and our Saviour that we may believe in his holy name, love him with all our hearts, and by making him the object of our imitation and the foundation of our faith, resemble him on earth, and follow him to heaven; an establishment which produces these excellent effects ought to be cherished by every good Government, in its own defence, as the guardian and nourisher of the purest social, and domestic virtues. . . . Indeed a Christian nation without a religious establishment is a contradiction. . . . Should the future historian feel inclined to find fault with the little that has been done by the first Protestant Bishop of Quebec, I request him to pause before pronouncing judgment, in order to examine the many obstacles in his Lordship’s way during the whole of his Episcopacy, and how little his efforts were seconded by those who were able to command success, and indeed how little disposition the people of Great Britain manifested, till lately, towards the religious instruction of their colonies. . . . Is it to be wondered at that under such circumstances, the religious benefits of the Ecclesiastical Establishment of England are little known or felt, and that Sectaries of all descriptions are increasing on every side? And when it is considered that the religious teachers of the other denominations of Christians, a very few respectable Ministers of the Church of Scotland excepted, come almost universally from the Republican States of America, where they gather their knowledge and form their sentiments, it is quite evident, that if the Imperial Government does not immediately step forward with efficient help, the mass of the population will be nurtured and instructed in hostility to our parent Church, nor will it be long till they imbibe opinions anything but favourable to the political institutions of England. . . . To form colonies under the guidance of Christian principles, is one of the noblest and most beneficial purposes which governments can fulfil. . . . In vain shall Great Britain confer upon her colonies the free government and liberal principles of legislation, for which she is distinguished, if she do not carry with her the revelations of God. . . . Let her therefore no longer leave to individuals or associations the labour of evangelizing her colonies, or even the whole world—their means are inadequate, and acting without a concert, their progress must be slow and uncertain. . . . At an expense trifling indeed, compared to what she frequently spends upon unprofitable contests, she might place the moral world on a new foundation, and to rise the pinnacle of moral glory. By adopting a uniform system of religious instruction for all her colonies in the East, as well as in the West, and following it up with energy and skill, she will establish an Empire more absolute than any, which unhallowed power can hold in subjection, and which will rest on the affections and opinions of more than two hundred millions of men. Nor would such a policy, sublime and affecting as it is, and pregnant with happiness and peace, increase her expenditure, for as the

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document 16 influence of christian principles extended, the charge for physical coercion would become less—murmurs would give way to blessings and praise; and one fourth of the human race being thus reclaimed, the remainder would gradually follow, and thus the whole Earth become the Garden of the Lord. . . . The churches are indeed thinly scattered over this vast country, and bear a striking resemblance to the small congregations of primitive Christians in the days of the Apostles, but it is to be hoped that, through the blessing of God, the intervening spaces will soon be adorned with new congregations, till the whole population shall become united in one holy communion. And when this happy period shall arrive, how many pleasing associations will be coupled in their minds, with the recollection of the first Bishop of the Diocese, who gave life and order to that religious establishment, which guides them to salvation. . . . [H]is name shall be had in everlasting remembrance, and future times will have reason to bless the first Bishop of Quebec, by whose exertions a fair foundation has been laid for the diffusion of Christianity through these Provinces, according to the Apostolic principles of the Church of England, “a Church which, arrayed in her beautiful garments, is turning darkness into light, and sowing those seeds of righteousness and truth which shall spring up and bloom for ever.” Source: Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 58231.

Document 16

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Excerpt from Egerton Ryerson, Story of My Life My first appointment after my admission on trial was to the (what was then called the) York and Yonge Street Circuit, which then embraced the Town of York (now the City of Toronto), Weston, the Townships of Vaughan, King, West Gwillimbury, North Gwillimbury, East Gwillimbury, Whitchurch, Markham, Pickering, Scarboro’, and York, over which we travelled, and preached from twentyfive to thirty-five sermons in four weeks, preaching generally three times on Sabbath and attending three class meetings, besides preaching and attending class meetings on week days. The roads were (if in any place they could be called roads) bad beyond description; could only be travelled on horse-back, and on foot; the labours hard, and the accommodations of the most primitive kind; but we were received as angels of God by the people, our ministrations being almost the only supply of religious instruction to them; and nothing they valued more than to have the preacher partake of their humble and best hospitality. . . . At this juncture, (April, 1826,) a publication appeared, entitled “Sermon Preached and Published by the Venerable Archdeacon of York, in May, 1826, on the Death of the Late Bishop of Quebec,” containing a sketch of the rise and progress of the Church of England in these provinces, and an appeal on behalf of that Church to the British Government and Parliament. In stating the ob-

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document 16 stacles which impeded the progress of the Church of England in Upper Canada, the memorable Author of the able discourse attacked the character of the religious persuasions not connected with the Church of England; especially the Methodists, whose ministers were represented as American in their origin and feelings, ignorant, forsaking their proper employment to preach what they did not understand, and which, from their pride, they disdained to learn; and were spreading disaffection to the civil and religious institutions of Great Britain. In this sermon, not only was the status of the Church of England claimed as the Established Church of the Empire, and exclusively entitled to the Clergy Reserves, or one seventh of the lands of Upper Canada, but an appeal was made to the Imperial Government and Parliament for a grant of £300,000 per annum, to enable the Church of England in Upper Canada, to maintain the loyalty of Upper Canada to England. . . . The Methodists in York (now Toronto) at that time (1826) numbered about fifty persons, young and old; the two preachers arranged to meet once in four weeks on their return from their country tours, when a social meeting of the leading members of the society was held for conversation, consultation, and prayer. One of the members of this company obtained and brought to the meeting a copy of the Archdeacon’s sermon, and read the parts of it which related to the attacks upon the Methodists, and the proposed method of exterminating them. The reading of those extracts produced a thrilling sensation of indignation and alarm, and all agreed that something must be written and done to defend the character and rights of Methodists and others assailed, against such attacks and such a policy. The voice of the meeting pointed to me to undertake this work. I was then designated as “The Boy Preacher,” from my youthful appearance, and as the youngest minister in the Church. I objected on account of my youth and incompetence. . . . Two of the senior brethren took the manuscript to the printer, and its publication produced a sensation scarcely less violent and general than a Fenian invasion. It is said that before every house in Toronto might be seen groups reading and discussing the paper on the evening of its publication in June; and the excitement spread throughout the country. It was the first defiant defence of the Methodists, and of the equal and civil rights of all religious persuasions; the first protest and argument on legal and British constitutional grounds, against the erection of a dominant church establishment supported by the state in Upper Canada. . . . Several months after the commencement of this controversy, I paid my first annual visit to my parents, and for the first two days the burden of my Father’s conversation was this controversy which was agitating the country. At length, while walking in the orchard, my Father turned short, and in a stern tone, said, “Egerton, they say that you are the author of these papers which are convulsing the whole country. I want to know whether you are or not?” I was compelled to

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document 17 acknowledge that I was the writer of these papers, when my Father lifted up his hands, in an agony of feeling, and exclaimed, “My God! we are all ruined!” Source: Egerton Ryerson, Story of My Life: Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years’ Public Service in Canada [Toronto: W. Briggs, 1883], 47–51.

Document 17 Bishop George Hills to the Church Committee of Douglas and Lillooet, British Columbia, 1861 (Complete)

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New Westminster, July 31st, 1861. Gentlemen, I understand grants have been made from the public revenue towards the churches you are building in Douglas and Lillooet. In what I am about to say, I expose myself to the charge of undue interference since these grants were made, not to me, but to yourselves and your rising towns in aid of your own laudable exertions. I am sure that the executive has been moved by the highest motives, and a desire to see truth and religion flourish in our land. I feel, therefore, a great responsibility when I ask you to endeavour to carry on your good work without these grants. My reasons are: 1. Although given on the fair principle of assisting the first efforts only of a place to build a church, without regard to denomination, there is the certainty of misconstruction, and of the charge of favouritism, causing jealousies and illfeeling, such as on behalf of the Church of England, which happens in these cases to be “first in the field,” I am by all means desirous of preventing. 2. Grants if made at all cannot stop at this point, but must be extended further, and every section of the tax-paying public will have the right to demand a portion of the public money on exactly equal terms, whether for the advancement of truth or error—a result in my opinion embarrassing to a government and not conducive to the glory of God. 3. There exists a wide-spread and deeply rooted objection in the community against such grants; a feeling shared, I believe, almost universally by the Clergy of the Church of England of this Colony. 4. The system has been tried in other British possessions, and has either been abandoned as unsuccessful, or is the cause of much irritation and contention, such as we would gladly avoid here. Should you deem it right to act upon my suggestion and decline all State aid, I am ready, towards the additional burden which must fall upon you, to

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document 18 increase the sum I have already promised from the funds at my disposal, and sincerely trust the good work will still go on. I am, Gentlemen, Your faithful friend and Servant, g. columbia. Source: Frank A. Peake, The Anglican Church in British Columbia (Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1959), 48–49.

Document 18

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Excerpts from [Thomas Brock Fuller], “Thoughts on the Present State and Future Prospects of the Church of England in Canada: With Hints for Some Improvements in Her Ecclesiastical Arrangements Humbly Addressed to the Rt. Rev. the Lord Bishop and the Rev. Clergy by a Presbyter of the Diocese of Quebec” (1836) In presuming to address my venerable and beloved diocesan and my reverend brethren, on a subject of such importance, as that to which I here call their attention, I lay claim to no high official station; to no extensive influence, which, of itself, would give weight to any opinions or suggestions I may offer, for none such do I possess. I only claim their forbearance, as one that has facts to state, and arguments to offer, till they have considered those facts, and weighed well those arguments. . . . I would crave the attention of all, to the necessity, which lies upon us to adopt measures, which, under God, may be the means of at once extending to others, and confirming to all those blessings, which some so happily enjoy. There are, thanks be to God, many places supplied with able and devoted clergymen, which wanted them ten years ago; but there are far more who want them now; and to supply which, we cannot look to the same quarter whence we have hitherto been so kindly assisted. Scattered throughout this extensive diocese, there are thousands of church people, who not only, no longer “hear the sound of the church going bell,” but who never see the face of a minister of their church. . . . The next subject that attracts our attention, is the state of the older parishes. Here things are encouraging, if we look only at the present. But is it not the part of a wise man, to provide in time against a storm? And do not we see, that this is an age abounding with storms, and that, in a storm, the government would be to us no place of refuge? Do not all see that, though the faith of the government be pledged, yet that government may be obliged to yield to the increasing power of the radical faction; that it may itself be overturned, or that this country may be separated from the mother country? In case any one of these calamities should occur, (none of which are so improbable in an age like this, that a wise man would think it being over prudent to guard against its occurrence,)

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document 18 could the clergy support themselves and families on nothing? Would the parishes yield a sufficient support for them, if they were thus thrown upon them, when their shoulders were unused to the burden, having ever before been entirely unaccustomed to bear even the smallest weight? I think not; or else human nature is very different from what I imagine it to be; very different from what it shewed itself to be, when, at the American revolution the Protestant Episcopal Church met with a calamity similar to that which I have supposed it possible may happen to our church. She then found that the foreign and government assistance, which she had ever considered of great service to her, as it doubtless was, could avail her nothing in such an evil hour. She found that her people, enervated by foreign aid, were not fitted for bearing the burden thus suddenly thrown upon them. . . . The next subject that craves our attention is the means of supporting our Diocesan, when the Lord, in the inscrutable ways of his providence, shall be pleased to take from us him, (which day may it be yet distant,) who has so faithfully and so successfully labored amongst us for such a length of time. Some means of support must be devised other than that hitherto enjoyed, for that is to be discontinued when our beloved father shall be called to enter into that “rest which remaineth for the people of God.” If no means of support are provided, either no Bishop can be obtained, or the office must be conferred upon one of the Rectors, who would be obliged to hold it in connection with his rectory; in which case its duties could be but inadequately performed, or it must go a-begging, till a clergyman of independent fortune can be found, willing to take upon himself its responsibilities and its labors. . . . The impossibility of furnishing, under present arrangements, our church with suitably educated clergymen, natives of the Province, is the next subject that calls for our attention. Without depreciating in the least the valuable services of the clergy from England and Ireland, to whom the church owes much of its improvement, within the last ten years, I think that all will acknowledge, that young men, educated in the country, habituated to the manners and customs of the people, endeared to the fatigues and privations attendant upon a missionary’s life in new countries, and accustomed to the climate, from which many strangers suffer severely, are, coeteris paribus, better suited for supplying our wants than those educated in Europe. . . . That we should never depend upon a supply from Europe, even though such a supply were the best, must be clear to every one who considers that, the certainty of such a supply depends, not on the demands for clergymen here, but on the want of such demand there, or on some other equally uncertain and continually fluctuating cause. . . . That we possess at present no means of giving such an education to our young men, must strike any one who looks in vain throughout the length and breadth of this vast diocese, for a regularly established and well patronized “school of the Prophets.” . . .

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document 18 Such I conceive to be a true, though afflictive picture of our wants, and of our weaknesses. . . . To supply our wants, and to relieve us from our difficulties, we must no longer depend upon the favor of government, or trust much to the property we now hold, for probably we will find them both but as broken reeds in the day of need. No! for the opening of new missions—for the support of old established parishes—for the maintenance of our Diocesan—for the establishment and support of Societies or circulating the scriptures, &c. and for endowing and supporting colleges for the education of our candidates for the ministry, we must depend, chiefly, under God, upon our people, and our own exertions. . . . The next point to which I would humbly beg the attention of my Rt. Rev. Father and my Rev. Brethren, is one delicate, indeed. . . . This is an age proverbial for irregularity and disregard for all constituted authority. . . . But what is the condition of our church in this age, abounding with confusion and every evil work? Where is her discipline? Where can we find laws binding upon all her officers? Where are the rules, by the observance of which, she may appear “semper et ubique eadem?” If there are any such, I know them not. If it be answered, that there are the canons of the church, which all admitted to minister at her altars are bound to observe, I reply that they are not observed; that in a country like this they cannot be observed. The evil that might, and in some cases actually does arise, from this want of canons, suitable for the state of things in this country, must be manifest to all. So great is the difference that is to be found in different churches, in the order observed in the services, in the doctrines preached, in the different standards of holiness held up to the people, arising from this circumstance, and the want of regular schools of the Prophets, that a person, removing from one parish to another, feels himself as no longer a member of the same church, but as a stranger in a strange house. . . . To meet all these wants, and to avoid all these difficulties, I see no other mode, than a thorough change in our ecclesiastical arrangements. To changes, in general, I am decidedly averse; but when a change is absolutely necessary to the well being, or rather to the very existence of our church, let us not object to it. Whilst things remained as they were ten years ago, there was less cause for any change. But since our situation itself has been materially changed; since, from being a mere body of missionaries, and of course under the control of the missionary society that sent us out and supported us by its bounty, having had that bond severed, we have been constituted a different body, some change in our arrangements is necessary to meet this change in our situation. . . . We require some change; a change which, under God, will meet our wants, and remove our difficulties. No change will effect this, less than one by which we may be enabled, together with lay delegates from our parishes, frequently to meet in general council: nothing less than the adoption of a code of laws, embraced in a new constitution, can bring order and regularity to our church, nothing short of

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document 18 the admission of the laity in our councils will give us strength and energy. The laity alone have in their hands what can supply our wants. Before we can avail our selves of it, we must allow them to have some voice in its disbursement. This is human nature. No free nation will allow itself to be taxed, directly or indirectly, unless it has a voice in the disbursement of the monies raised by those taxes. That this change will, under God, effect the desired purpose, is no mere vain imagination. Experience is acknowledged on all sides to outweigh the most subtle arguments; and experience will tell us, that the very measures here proposed have effected the very end desired, under similar, or even much worse circumstances. No one can deny this, who is acquainted with the history of the church in the United States. Her situation at the time of the revolution, was far worse than ours now is. . . . For years she struggled to rise from this blow, and to live down those deep rooted prejudices which her former connexion with England and the loyalty of many of her members, had raised against her. So late as 1811, she could only number eight Bishops and about two hundred clergy. Since that period, and especially within the last few years, she has risen like a Phoenix from her ashes. In the language of [an historian of the Episcopal Church], “Her Dioceses are twenty-two in number, under the superintendence of seventeen Bishops, with the venerable Bishop White still at their head. Her clergy amount to eight hundred, and are daily increasing in devotion, in learning, and in zeal. . . . Her four Theological Seminaries send forth more clergymen every three years than the whole church possessed thirty years ago.” If it be asked how has all this been effected, the answer is, by the blessing of the great Head of the Church upon the wise councils and strenuous exertions of her children. If it be inquired what were the chief means used, I reply, the faithful preaching of God’s word; unity of purpose and action; the adoption of canons suitable for the state of the country, and binding upon all; and the active assistance of their laity. The conventions provided for by their constitution have been the instruments, under God, by which this wonderful change has been effected. . . . By the power lodged within them and by the influence they exert over all the members of the church, these conventions give her at once order, unity and strength. In them the laity, as is acknowledged on all hands, have proved most useful, especially in matters partaking rather of a secular nature, for which they are evidently better fitted than the clergy can be. Taking part in her councils, they have given to the church that energy and ability which we so greatly need. Interested in her welfare, they have been led to study her distinctive principles, and thus have learned to love her more and more. . . . It may again be objected that the admission of the laity into the councils of the church is contrary to the practice of the apostolic and primitive church. To this I reply, that is not quite so clear as may be imagined. If we look at Acts 1:15, 16, 23 and 26, at 15:22, 23 and 25, we will find that the councils were not confined to the apostles. Ecclesiastical historians tell us, that the exclusion of the laity, and,

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document 19 soon after, of the inferior clergy from the councils, thence composed of the Bishops, was the beginning of that spirit which afterwards placed all the other Bishops under the feet of him of Rome. . . . If, then, each year increases our wants and our difficulties, surely we are called no longer to delay our exertions. Surely to us the language of Solomon is addressed, “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.” Let us, then, come together at the Bishop’s several invitations, fully prepared to do something effectual for the good of our Zion. Let each pray, study, devise; let each come prepared to act, as if everything depended upon him alone, and, when met together, let each approach the business with the feeling that he has talents committed to his care; but, at the same time, in the spirit of meekness, “each esteeming other better than himself;” and may the Lord give this his blessing: Amen. Source: Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 24162.

Document 19 Excerpts from “Minutes of a Conference of the Bishops of Quebec, Toronto, Newfoundland, Fredericton, and Montreal, Holden at Quebec from Sept. 24th to Oct. 1st, 1851”

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I. general declaration We, the undersigned, Bishops of the North American Colonies in the Province of Canterbury, having had opportunity granted to us of meeting together, have thereupon conferred with each other respecting the trust and charge committed to our hands, and certain peculiar difficulties of a local nature which attach to the same. We desire, therefore, in the first place, to record our thankfulness that we have been so permitted to assemble, and our sense of the responsibility lying upon us before God and the world to promote the glory of His great Name, to advance the kingdom of His Son, to seek the salvation of immortal souls, and what we feel to be inseparably united with these objects, to establish and extend, wherever there is a demand for her services, the system, the teaching, the worship, and the ordinances of the United Church of England and Ireland. We feel that, in the prosecution of this great work, we are surrounded by many discouragements, embarrassments, and hindrances, which, by the grace of God, we are prepared patiently to encounter, and, while they may be appointed to continue, patiently to endure, but for which, nevertheless, it is our duty to seek all lawful remedy, if such remedy is to be found. We have therefore prepared the statement which follows, of our views in relation to these subjects of our care and solicitude; and we desire to commend it to the favourable consideration of our Metropolitan, his Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, in the hope that he may be moved to assist us in obtaining relief from those evils of which we have to complain, as well as to counsel

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document 19 us in the disposal of questions which come before us in exercise of our Episcopal duties.

II. convocation In consequence of the anomalous state of the Church of England in these Colonies with reference to its General Government, and the doubts entertained as to the validity of any Code of Ecclesiastical Law, the Bishops of these Dioceses experience great difficulty in acting in accordance with their Episcopal Commission and Prerogatives, and their decisions are liable to misconstruction, as if emanating from their individual will, and not from the general body of the Church; we, therefore, consider it desirable, in the first place, that the Bishops, Clergy, and Laity of the Church of England in each Diocese should meet together in Synod, at such times and in such manner as may be agreed. Secondly, that the laity in such Synod should meet by representation, and that their representatives be communicants. Thirdly, it is our opinion that, as questions will arise from time to time which will affect the welfare of the Church in these Colonies, it is desirable that the Bishops, Clergy, and Laity should meet in council under a provincial Metropolitan, with power to frame such rules and regulations for the better conduct of our Ecclesiastical affairs as by the said council may be deemed expedient. Fourthly, that the said council should be divided into two houses, the one consisting of the Bishops of these several Dioceses under their Metropolitan, and the other of the Presbyters and Lay members of the Church assembled (as before mentioned) by representation. Upon these grounds it appears to us necessary that a Metropolitan should be appointed for the North American Dioceses. . . .

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XV. maintenance of the clergy While we hold it to be the duty of Christian Governments to maintain inviolate whatever endowments have been lawfully and religiously made for the establishment, support or extension of the Christian Religion; and while we acknowledge, with heartfelt gratitude, the aid given to our missions by the venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to whose fostering care and bounty the Church in these Colonies owes, under God, its existence and means of usefulness, we desire to record our conviction that the Ordinances of the Church will never be rightly valued, nor its strength fully developed, until the people, for whose benefit the Clergy minister in holy things, furnish a more adequate support to the Institutions and to the Clergy of their Church. Further, as the Society, in consequence of numerous and increasing claims in all parts of the world, is compelled gradually to withdraw its aid, we desire to impress on all our flocks the duty of fulfilling their obligations in respect of the payment of their Ministers; and, with a view to this object, we recommend

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document 20 that the Churchwardens in each parish or mission should furnish every year to the Bishop a written return, duly certified by themselves and by the Clergyman, of the sums paid toward his support for the current year.

XVI. conclusion

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Lastly, while we acknowledge it to be the bounden duty of ourselves and our Clergy, by God’s grace assisting us, in our several stations, to do the work of good evangelists, yet we desire to remember that we have most solemnly pledged ourselves to fulfil this work of our ministry, according to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, and as faithful subjects of Her most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, “unto whom the chief government of all estates of this realm, whether they be ecclesiastical or civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign jurisdiction.” And we cannot forbear expressing our unfeigned thankfulness to Almighty God that He has preserved to us, in this branch of Christ’s Holy Church, the assurance of an Apostolic commission for our Ministerial calling; and, together with it, a confession of pure and catholic truth, and the fulness of sacramental Grace. May He graciously be pleased to direct and guide us all in the use of these precious gifts, enable us to serve Him in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life, and finally bring us to His Heavenly Kingdom through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Signed) g. j. quebec. john toronto. edward newfoundland. john fredericton. f. montreal. Source: Colonial Church Chronicle, 5: 410–16, reprinted in Armine W. Mountain, A Memoir of George Jehoshaphat Mountain (Montreal: Lovell, 1966), 294–99, and in Henry Lowther Clarke, Constitutional Church Government in the Dominions beyond the Seas and in Other Parts of the Anglican Communion (Toronto: Macmillan, 1924), 211–16.

Document 20 Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, “Declaration” (October 26, 1854) (Complete)

declaration. We, the Bishop, the Clergy, and Representatives of the Laity of the United Church of England and Ireland, within the Diocese of Toronto, assembled in Synod, and intending, under God’s blessing and guidance, to consider and determine upon such matters as shall appear necessary for the welfare of the

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document 20 Church in this diocese, desire, in the first place, for the avoiding of all misunderstanding and scandal, to make a declaration of the principles upon which we purpose to proceed. We desire that the church in this colony shall continue, as it has been, an integral portion of the United Church of England and Ireland. As members of that church, we recognize the true canon of holy scripture, as received by that church, to be the rule and standard of faith: we acknowledge the book of Common Prayer and Sacraments, together with the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, to be the true and faithful declaration of the doctrines contained in holy scripture; we maintain the form of church government by bishops, priests, and deacons, as scriptural and apostolical; and we declare our firm and unanimous resolution, in dependance on divine aid, to preserve those doctrines and that form of church government, and to transmit them to our posterity. In particular, we uphold the ancient doctrine of our church, that the Queen is rightfully possessed of the chief government or supremacy over all persons within her dominions, in all causes whether ecclesiastical or civil; and we desire that such supremacy should continue unimpaired. It is our earnest wish and determination to confine our deliberations and action to matters of discipline, to the temporalities of the church, and to such regulations of order as may tend to her efficiency and extension; and we desire no control or authority over any but those who are, or shall be, members of our own church. We conceive that the following, and such like subjects, may fitly come under our consideration, and lead to action on our part. 1. To frame a Constitution for the Synod, and to regulate the time and place of its meetings, and the order and manner of its proceedings. 2. To provide for the proper exercise of ecclesiastical discipline, in regard to both clergy and laity. 3. To provide for the extension and temporal well-being of the church, and the support of the clergy and schoolmasters, for the maintenance of public worship, and the diffusion of a sound religious education. 4. To promote and regulate the building and consecration of churches, and the erection of parsonages and schoolhouses. 5. To provide for the division of the diocese into parishes with regulations for future sub-divisions. 6. To provide (with consent of the Crown, where needed) fit regulations for the appointment of bishops, priests and deacons. 7. To regulate the fees for marriages and other offices of the church. 8. To provide, with the consent of the Crown, for the division of the diocese into new dioceses, either forthwith, or at any future period. 9. To procure from the Colonial Legislature any laws, or modifications of laws, which the circumstances of the church may require.

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document 21 These are subjects which will supply abundant employment for our Synods, and they are such as the circumstances of the church in this Province imperatively require her clergy and laity to deal with. In adopting synodical action upon such a principle, we feel that we shall not be infringing the royal prerogative; and we are the more free to enter upon such action from having learned that a high legal authority in the Mother Church has declared that there is no real impediment to the action of diocesan synods, and from knowing that the Imperial Legislature has affirmed the principle that the colonial church ought to have the power of the management of its internal affairs. Though we could have desired that an Act of the Imperial Legislature (founded on the views of the archbishops and bishops, and other well informed persons, both at home and in the colonies) should have laid down the basis of such a constitution as should have been suitable for the action of synodical assemblies in all the colonies, in order that the unity of all parts of the church might be completely preserved; yet the exigency of our affairs does not admit of any further delay. If, at any future period, such constitution should be framed by adequate authority, we shall cheerfully modify what has been done by ourselves, so as to bring it into conformity with the decisions of such authority. Meanwhile, we have reason to trust that the other dioceses of BNA will adopt a line of conduct similar to our own, and thus enable us to confer with them; so that, by mutual consultation, such a constitution may be adopted as will mark our unity both of principle and sentiment, and form the basis of combined action for many generations to come. We trust likewise that, by the same means, or through the action of the Crown, the whole of these dioceses may be united into one ecclesiastical province under its proper metropolitan, and with its Provincial Council; which may frame canons for our joint action, and be a Court of Appeal, if questions should arise in any diocese which cannot be settled by the Synod of the diocese itself. In conclusion, we humbly pray that the God of unity and peace may be with us, and so chasten our affections, purify our motives, and guide our judgment, that we may be enabled to contribute to the efficiency, concord, and stability of the church in this land. Source: Toronto Synod Journal, 1854, 77–80.

Document 21 A parish in the diocese of Nova Scotia, “Declaration” (1854) (Complete) we, the undersigned, beg leave respectfully to state that we are opposed to the formation of a Synod and any other ecclesiastical body with powers to change the established laws of the Church, for the following reasons:

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document 22 1. That this introduction will sever the link between Church and State which has long existed to the great advantage of both. 2. It invades the rights of the Crown. 3. It unsettles the Church and gives room for dangerous changes in things which no changes could improve. 4. As we are led to believe the power of veto is to be vested in the Bishop, we object to it as conferring an arbitrary and unlimited power, which may be exercised to the detriment of the Church. 5. It reduces our National Church to a mere sect. 6. It divides the Church into as many fragments as there are Bishoprics. 7. The introduction of this change is at this period particularly dangerous when Tractarianism in the form of a concealed enemy is labouring indefatigably to undermine the Church, and we know the formation of Colonial Synods to be a Tractarian measure. 8. The creation of a body with undefined and unlimited power to rule the Church is yielding up our liberty without necessity and without receiving any equivalent. For this and many other reasons we hereby protest against the formation of a Colonial Synod in Nova Scotia, and we will not submit to the Synod if formed by others, or to any other Ecclesiastical body which shall assume to itself power over the Church, but we will remain true to our principles as we have received them from our reformers, to our country, and to our Sovereign. Source: Henry Lowther Clarke, Constitutional Church Government in the Dominions beyond the Seas and in Other Parts of the Anglican Communion (Toronto: Macmillan, 1924), 11.

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Document 22 Province of Canada, “An Act to Enable the Members of the United Church of England and Ireland in Canada to Meet in Synod” (1857) (Complete) whereas, doubts exist whether the members of the United Church of England and Ireland in this Province have the power of regulating the affairs of their Church, in matters relating to discipline, and necessary to order and good government, and it is just that such doubts should be removed, in order that they may be permitted to exercise the same rights of self-government that are enjoyed by other religious communities: Therefore Her Majesty, etc., enacts as follows: I. The Bishop, Clergy and Laity, members of the United Church of England and Ireland in this Province, may meet in their several Dioceses, which are now or may be hereafter constituted in this Province, and, in such manner and by such proceedings as they shall adopt, frame constitutions and make regulations for enforcing discipline in the Church, for the appointment, deposition, depri-

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document 23 vation, or removal of any person bearing office therein, of whatever order or degree, and for the convenient and orderly management of the property, affairs and interest of the Church in matters relating to and affecting only the said Church, and the officers and members thereof, and not in any manner interfering with the rights, privileges or interests of other religious communities, or of any person or persons not being a member or members of the said United Church of England and Ireland; Provided always that such constitutions and regulations shall apply only to the Diocese or Dioceses adopting the same. II. The Bishops, Clergy, and Laity, members of the United Church of England and Ireland in this Province, may meet in general assembly within this Province, by such Representatives as shall be determined and declared by them in their several Dioceses; and in such general assembly frame a constitution and regulations for the general management and good government of the said Church in this Province: Provided always, that nothing in this Act contained shall authorise the imposition of any rate or tax upon any person or persons whomsoever, whether belonging to the said Church or not, or the infliction of any punishment, fine or penalty upon any person, other than his suspension or removal from an office in the said Church, or exclusion from the meetings or proceedings of the Diocesan or General Synods; and provided also, that nothing in the said constitutions or regulations, or any of them, shall be contrary to any law or statute now or hereafter in force in this Province. Source: Province of Canada Statutes, 1856 cap. 141.

Document 23

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Excerpts from Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Long v. Gray (1863) . . . To what extent, then, did Mr. Long, by the acts to which we have referred, subject himself to the authority of the Bishop in temporal matters? With the Bishop’s authority in spiritual affairs, or Mr. Long’s obligations in foro conscientiae, we have not to deal. We think that the acts of Mr. Long must be construed with reference to the position in which he stood as a clergyman of the Church of England, towards a lawfully appointed Bishop of that Church, and to the authority known to belong to that office in England; and we are of opinion that by taking the oath of canonical obedience to his Lordship, and accepting from him a license to officiate, and have the cure of souls within the parish of Mowbray, subject to revocation for just cause, and by accepting the appointment to the living of Mowbray under a deed which expressly contemplated as one means of avoidance the removal of the incumbent for lawful cause,—Mr. Long did voluntarily submit himself to the authority of the Bishop to such an extent as to enable the Bishop to deprive him of his benefice for any lawful cause, that is, for such cause as (having regard to any differences which may arise from the circumstances of

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document 23 the Colony) would authorise the deprivation of a clergyman by his Bishop in England. We adopt the language of Mr. Justice Watermeyer, p. 81, that “for the purpose of the contract between the Plaintiff and Defendant, we are to take them as having contracted that the laws of the Church of England shall, though only as far as applicable here, govern both.” Is, then, Mr. Long shown to have been guilty of any offences which, by the laws of the Church of England, would have warranted his suspension and subsequent deprivation? This depends mainly on the point whether Mr. Long was justified in refusing to take the steps which the Bishop required him to take, in order to procure the election of a delegate for the parish of Mowbray to the Synod convened for the 17th January, 1861. In what manner and by what acts did he contract this obligation? The Letters-Patent may be laid out of the case, for if the Bishop’s whole contention in respect of them be conceded, they conferred on him no power of convening a meeting of clergy and laity to be elected in a certain manner prescribed by him for the purpose of making laws binding upon Churchmen. A very elaborate argument was entered into at our Bar in order to show that Diocesan Synods may be lawfully held in England without the license of the Crown, and that the Statute with respect to Provincial Synods does not extend to the Colonies. It is not necessary to enter into the learning on this subject. It is admitted that Diocesan Synods, whether lawful or not, unless with the license of the Crown, have not been in use in England for above two centuries; and Mr. Long, in recognising the authority of the Bishop, cannot be held to have acknowledged a right on his part to convene one, and to require his clergy to attend it. But it is a mistake to treat the Assembly convened by the Bishop as a Synod at all. It was a meeting of certain persons, both clergy and laity, either selected by the Bishop, or to be elected by such persons and in such manner as he had prescribed, and it was a meeting convened, not for the purpose of taking counsel and advising together what might be best for the general good of the society, but for the purpose of agreeing upon certain rules, and establishing in fact certain laws, by which all members of the Church of England in the Colony, whether they assented to them or not, should be bound. Accordingly, the Synod, which actually did meet, passed various acts and constitutions, purporting, without the consent either of the Crown or of the Colonial Legislature, to bind persons not in any manner subject to its control, and to establish Courts of Justice for some temporal as well as spiritual matters, and in fact the Synod assumed powers which only the Legislature could possess. There can be no doubt that such acts were illegal. Now Mr. Long was required to give effect, as far as he could, to the constitution of this body, and to take steps ordered by that body for convening one of a similar nature. He was furnished with a copy of the Acts and Constitution

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document 24 of the last Synod, and he was requested to attend carefully to the inclosed printed regulations with regard to the election of Delegates. He clearly, therefore, was required to do more than give notice of a meeting, and he could not give the notice at all without himself fixing the time and place at which the meeting was to be held. He was required to do various acts of a formal character for the purpose of calling into existence a body which he had always refused to recognise, and which he was not bound by any law or duty to acknowledge. The oath of canonical obedience does not mean that the clergyman will obey all the commands of the Bishop against which there is no law, but that he will obey all such commands as the Bishop by law is authorised to impose; and even if the meaning of the rubric referred to by the Bishop in his case were such as he contends for,—which we think that it is not,—it would not apply to the present case, in which more was required from Mr. Long than merely to publish a notice. We are therefore of opinion that the order of suspension issued by the Bishop was one which was not justified by the conduct of Mr. Long, and that the subsequent sentence of deprivation founded upon his disobedience to the order of suspension must fall with it. Source: [1863] 1 Moore’s Privy Council Reports ns 41, reprinted in Charles Gray, Life of Robert Gray, Bishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of Africa, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons, 1876) 2: 577–91.

Document 24

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Address of the Provincial Synod of Canada to the Archbishop of Canterbury, September 16, 1865 (Complete) To His Grace Charles Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, D.D., Primate of all England, and Metropolitan: May it please Your Grace, We, the Bishops, Clergy and Laity of the Province of Canada, in Triennial Synod assembled, desire to represent to Your Grace that in consequence of the recent decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in the wellknown case respecting the Essays and Reviews, and also in the case of the Bishop of Natal and the Bishop of Capetown, the minds of many members of the Church have been unsettled or painfully alarmed, and that doctrines hitherto believed to be Scriptural and undoubtedly held by the members of the Church of England and Ireland, have been adjudicated upon by the Privy Council in such a way as to lead thousands of our brethren to conclude that, according to this decision, it is quite compatible with membership in the Church of England to discredit the historical facts of Holy Scripture and to disbelieve the eternity of

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document 25 future punishment. Moreover, we would express to Your Grace the intense alarm felt by many in Canada lest the tendency of the revival of the active powers of Convocation should leave us governed by Canons different from those in force in England and Ireland, and thus cause us to drift into the status of an independent branch of the Catholic Church, a result which we would at this time most solemnly deplore. In order, therefore, to comfort the souls of the faithful and reassure the minds of the wavering members of the Church and to obviate so far as may be the suspicion whereby so many are scandalised, that the Church is a creation of Parliament, we humbly entreat Your Grace, since the assembly of a general Council of the whole Catholic Church is at present impracticable, to convene a National Synod of the Bishops of the Anglican Church at home and abroad, who, attended by one or more of their Presbyters or Laymen learned in Ecclesiastical law as their advisers, may meet together and under the guidance of the Holy Ghost take such counsel, and adopt such measures, as may be best fitted to provide for the present distress in such Synod presided over by Your Grace. (Signed) F. Montreal. Metropolitan, President. (Signed) Jas. Beaven, D.D., Prolocutor. Source: [Ada Leigh Lewis], The Life of John Travers Lewis, D.D. (London: Skeffington and Son, [1930?]), 71–73.

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Excerpts from Bishops of General Synod, “Pastoral Letter” (1893)

pastoral letter. to be read in the churches by direction of the house of bishops of the church of england in canada. To the Faithful in Christ Jesus, Members of the Church of England in Canada, Greeting:

consolidation. Your Chief Pastors hasten to make you partakers of their joy in the Consolidation of our Church, now happily completed. Hitherto some of our Dioceses have had the opportunity of acting together in their Ecclesiastical Provinces of Canada and Rupert’s Land. Others outside these two provinces have been standing alone, unable, by reason of their isolation, to receive or to impart that additional life and strength and energy which are found in union.

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document 25 Now, from East to West—from the Atlantic to the Pacific—all are united in the General Synod, which, through the good hand of our God upon us, has been constituted with the hearty good will of all. In it and through it, all our Dioceses are so bound together that they can “take sweet counsel together” and speak with one voice. Some thirty years ago the Civil Provinces of our country, so feeble in their isolation, were consolidated under the one Government of the Dominion of Canada. The results of that union are familiar to us all. They foreshadow the advantages which we may look for from the union of all our Dioceses under the General Synod.

fundamental principles. The life and rights and powers of our Dioceses will be just what they have been hitherto, except that a deeper meaning and fresh energy will be infused into them. For it is distinctly laid down as a fundamental principle that, “The General Synod shall not take away from, or interfere with, any rights, powers, or jurisdiction of any Diocesan Synod within its own territorial limits, as now held or exercised by such Synod.” Another fundamental principle is that the General Synod brings with it no change in the existing system of Provincial Synods. The retention or the abolition of the Provincial Synods is left to each Province and the Dioceses therein.

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solemn declaration. The first act of the General Synod was to set forth the position of the Church of England in Canada, in the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; the foundations of her faith, her worship, and her discipline, and her determination to maintain and transmit the same unimpaired. We repeat this Solemn Declaration to you today, and desire you to store it up in your hearts and minds:— In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. We, the Bishops, together with the Delegates from the Clergy and Laity of the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada, now assembled in the first General Synod, hereby make the following Solemn Declaration: We declare this Church to be, and desire that it shall continue, in full communion with the Church of England throughout the world, as an integral portion of the One Body of Christ composed of Churches which, united under the One Divine Head and in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, hold the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds as maintained by the undivided primitive Church in the undisputed Ecumenical Councils; receive the same Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as containing all things necessary to salvation; teach the same Word of God; partake of the same Divinely ordained Sacraments, through the ministry

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document 25 of the same Apostolic Orders, and worship One God and Father through the same Lord Jesus Christ, by the same Holy and Divine Spirit Who is given to them that believe to guide them into all truth. And are determined by the help of God to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments, and Discipline of Christ as the Lord hath commanded in His Holy Word, and as the Church of England hath received and set forth the same in “The Book of Common Prayer” and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, according to the use of the Church of England; together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, pointed as they are to be sung or said in Churches; and the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons;” and in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion; and to transmit the same unimpaired to our posterity.

definite teaching. The way to maintain and hand on the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, is to teach its truths fully, definitely, clearly. All classes, educated and uneducated alike, have suffered in the past and are suffering still, because there is a lack of definiteness, accuracy, and depth in the teaching afforded to them. The lessons of the Catechism and the Prayer Book are not vague and misty. They are clear and positive, like the facts with which they are concerned. Let all, both Clergy and Laity, see to it that these lessons are no mere sound of words. The History of the Church of God in all its dispensations, and especially in the Christian era, ought to be familiar. The first planting, the growth, and the continuity through the centuries, of England’s branch of the Holy Catholic Church should be presented in frequent lectures everywhere. . . .

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an unworldly church and clergy. Take care, too, that you are doing all in your power to provide a maintenance, not for your own clergyman only, but for all the ministers of the Church in your Diocese and in the mission field. It were well for you and your children to understand that “An unworldly church, an unworldly clergy, means not a poor church, a poverty stricken clergy. A poor, unprovided, dependent clergy is scarcely able to be an unworldly one, and accordingly cannot betoken an unworldly laity. A laity which breaks the bread of its ministers into smaller and smaller fragments, and has none of the divine power to multiply, works no miracle and has no honor. . . .”

missionary work. The Church exists for the purpose of bringing all men into union with God, through Jesus Christ, and teaching them to know and love and serve Him with their whole being. The more closely and completely she is one in every land, the

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document 26

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greater will be her power and efficiency to accomplish this far-reaching object of her existence. Accordingly we look for extended and more effective missionary effort as one of the brightest and best results of the Consolidation of the Church of England in Canada. The field, which the General Synod opens up for direct and promising labor, is bright and hopeful beyond the reach of man’s imaginings. It stretches across this great continent from shore to shore. Millions in the near future will plant their homes over its plains. The Lord, Who died for all, hath laid it on us in His Church that these homes should, from their first establishment, be Christian. Beyond the Pacific Ocean there are millions of heathen who have been brought by rapid steamships within our reach. They are accessible to us, and our Church can now act upon them and among them with combined force and energy. Besides these, there is a multitude of heathen Indians in the North-West of this Dominion, who have yet to be brought into the congregation of Christ’s flock. There is also a large company of Christian Indians, whose spiritual training has already been undertaken by our Church. . . . The larger obligations laid upon us at this time in the wider field opened by the Consolidation of our Church are bound up with our joy. We invite you to share the joy—which is yours as much as ours—and we bid you face with a good courage and firm resolve the claims of our new position, co-extensive with the Dominion of Canada. Brethren, we commend you to God and the word of His grace, which is able to build you up. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. [signed by fifteen bishops] September, a.d. 1893. Source: General Synod Journal, 1893.

Document 26 House of Bishops, “Statement of Counsel” (1975) (Complete) The House of Bishops, having met to give further consideration to questions of Christian unity and in particular to Plan of Union, is led to this statement of counsel. We are completely at one in affirming our primary and deep commitment to the unity of the Body of Christ. We affirm our intention to pursue this unity with all Christian people, and to continue with the United Church of Canada and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) our common search for a true and lasting union. We find ourselves agreed, too, that Plan of Union in its present form is un-

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document 27 acceptable; most of us doubt that there is serious hope for a successful outcome to a further revision process. We base this conclusion in part on our perception that our churches have not yet reached a common mind on faith and order. We think also that the climate of feeling, at least in our own constituency, seems at the present time less favourable to organic union and more disposed towards other expressions of unity. As a house we are increasingly aware of and commit ourselves to exploring such other approaches to unity, and sense that we are supported in this by the people of our church. We pledge ourselves to give leadership in the understanding and practice of the Lund principle—“That we should do nothing separately that we can do together”; in particular we stress new opportunities to share in nurturing and caring for people in the peculiar pressures and hurts of our times. We acknowledge our corporate responsibility to work further and still more seriously at the great questions of Faith and Order; we discern the particular contribution that is required of us in a renewed and deeper understanding of episcopacy in the life of the church. We have not been able to make this statement without prayer and study and self-examination; we offer it to the church with the continuing prayer that it may serve her unity. Source: Canadian Churchman 101 (March 1975): 1, 8.

Document 27

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Synod of the Diocese of Toronto, Memorial on Ritual (1868) (Complete) To the House of Clerical and Lay Delegates in Provincial Synod assembled: The Memorial of the Bishop, Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Toronto, in Synod assembled, humbly sheweth: That your memorialists, deeply grieved at the innovations in Ritual that are prevailing in some Churches in the Mother Country, and justly alarmed lest these innovations should extend to the Church in this Province, have had under their consideration during their present session the best and most effectual manner of dealing with this growing evil; and doubtful of their own power, as a Diocesan Synod, effectually to check the introduction of those extreme practices, they have resolved to invoke the aid of the Provincial Synod to assist them in preserving the pure and simple service and worship in our Churches, that have had the sanction of the Church for three hundred years; and with that view they pray that the Provincial Synod shall adopt such measures as will guard against such innovations which have been condemned by the Convocations of Canterbury and York, namely, the wearing of the chasuble, alb, cope and tunicle, altar-lights, incense, the use of wafer bread, the elevation of the elements

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documents 28 and 29 after consecration, and the encouragement of non-communicants to remain during the celebration of the Holy Communion. And your memorialists will ever pray. (Signed,) j. hillyard cameron, Chairman. Source: The Debates on Ritualism in the Provincial Synod [Montreal: John Lovell, 1868], p. 8, Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 06427.

Document 28 Provincial Synod of Canada, Resolution on Ritual (1868) (Complete) It is resolved by this Synod that the elevation of the elements during the celebration of the Holy Communion, the use of incense during Divine Service, and the mixing water with the sacramental wine, be hereby forbidden in this ecclesiastical Province; And, whereas, the Rubric at the end of the Communion Office enacts that it shall suffice that the bread shall be “such as is usual to be eaten,” the use of wafer bread is hereby forbidden. This Synod would express their disapprobation of the use of lights on the Lord’s Table, and vestments, except the surplice, stole or scarf, and hood, in saying the public prayers, or ministering the sacraments or other rites of the Church, and their determination to prevent, by every lawful means, their introduction into the Churches in this Province.

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Source: The Debates on Ritualism in the Provincial Synod [Montreal: John Lovell, 1868], pp. 67–68. Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 06427.

Document 29 John Medley, “Address” (1845) (Complete) Sir William Colebrooke, and Gentlemen: It affords me the highest gratification to hear from your Excellency sentiments to which every Christian heart must respond, and to find myself, on this eventful day, surrounded by the judges and law officers of the Province, by members of the Legislative Council and House of Assembly, and by men high in station in the Province, and distinguished for their talents, who have, with a unanimity worthy of the occasion, come forward to support this great undertaking. The building a Cathedral in this Province may in some sense be called a national work: for whatever reflects the genius, the piety, and the glory of England, adds lustre to the nation from which the original idea is derived. It is in

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document 29 many other respects important; not only as a national type of the unity of the Church, but as a consecration to God on the part of man of all these gifts which God has been pleased to vouchsafe to him. For when do we glorify God so much as when we consider nothing to be properly our own, when we look upon all as His, lent to us for our use, but to be given back to Him, the great and glorious Giver, and employed in His peculiar worship and service. Thus whatever our gifts be, whether they be gold and silver, whether they be wood or stone, whether they be skill in carving, force and eloquence in utterance, sweetness in music, taste in decoration, all are well used and employed in the material expression of our inward thanks and praise, of our love and devotion to His glorious Name. A Cathedral Church is also the common home of all; for as it is the mother of all the churches in the Diocese, so every one has a right to resort to it without payment, without that exclusive property in seats, alike forbidden in scripture, and unsanctioned by the custom of the purest ages of the Church. And I joyfully anticipate the day, whether I live to see it or no, when the full importance of this great principle will be felt, that all men are sinful creatures, desirous to abase themselves in God’s sight, and that, therefore, none should be excluded for want of money, and that there should be no distinction, but between those who serve the people and those who are served by them. And possibly many who do not yet enjoy the full blessing and privileges of our Church may yet feel inclined occasionally to enter a building so founded and built up. I am well aware that to the foundation of a Cathedral in this Province some persons may object that the money might be better expended than in what appears to them to be a lavish and wasteful expenditure, and needless display of ornament on the house of God. I for one, fearlessly appeal to the laity of this country, and plainly ask them, whether the foundation of a Cathedral is not accompanied by a simultaneous movement on the part of the Church, to extend and improve her missions, and to diffuse the glad tidings of the gospel to the remotest corners of the Province, and whether there be not an anxiety on the part of the founders of the Cathedral to promote the welfare of the poorest Church, and of the most uneducated and needy settlers? But let us join issue with such objectors on the footing of scripture; let us ask them, whether they recollect that on a single building, ninety feet long by thirty wide, every part of which was built by express direction from the Almighty, vouchsafed in writing, no less a sum than three or four millions of our money was expended? And if under any dispensation whatever, Almighty God would never have sanctioned anything morally wrong, why should we object to what has the direct sanction of the Old Testament, and is no where forbidden in the New? And when this so much praised plainness is carried out into the houses of the objectors themselves, when, in proportion to their increased means, men cease to ornament and fill with splendid furniture their own ‘ceiled houses,’ it will be time to let God’s house lie waste, and to strip it of the ornaments which a grateful

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document 29 heart may bestow upon it. Such parts, however, of every such building are probably better bestowed as gifts than taken from the general fund appropriated for the fabric. Having disposed, as it seems to me, of this objection, it remains that I endeavour to impress upon this large assembly the duty of united and zealous cooperation. This Cathedral Church will best be built by our adopting the excellent Cornish motto, ‘One and all’; by our reflecting that if we have little, ‘we should do our diligence to give of that little’; but if we have ample means, an abundant contribution will alone ensure its acceptance from the Almighty. Would to God, indeed, that every one who hears me this day could have worshipped within the walls of one of our glorious cathedrals in Old England! Then I am sure I should not need to urge on you this duty, but your own zeal would outrun my desires. Recollect that, though built in Fredericton, it belongs to the Province; the design was conceived, and the first contributions were raised in the Mother Country, and it would, indeed, be a disgrace to New Brunswick if the efforts of Englishmen were not seconded here. But I believe they will be seconded. The attendance here of so many from all parts of the Province, the zeal of all classes and condition of men, the kind and generous feelings already exhibited, put it beyond a doubt, that if we be only true to ourselves and to God, and do not suffer ourselves to be disheartened by the cry of the desponding, the work will be done; and we, by God’s grace, shall live, some of us, to see the topmost stone erected, and it will be a joy to some of the children whom I see around me to say, when they reach old age, My parents helped to rear the stones of that Cathedral Church, and my children’s children will rise up and call the builders blessed. I have now only once more to return you all my sincere thanks for your kindness in attending, for your active support, and likewise to the officers and band of the 33rd Regiment, who have so cheerfully rendered their assistance on this solemn occasion. Let us conclude, as we began, with prayer. O God, who hast built Thy Church on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the Chief Corner Stone; we give Thee humble thanks that Thou hast called us to the clear knowledge and light of Thy gospel, in Thy most blessed Son, by the Holy Spirit. We bless Thee that Thou hast at this time given us the opportunity to lay the foundation of this house of God. May it be raised in due season to be a most Holy Temple unto Thee—‘where our prayers may ascend up before Thee as incense, and the lifting up of our hands as the evening sacrifice.’ Finally, we give Thee most high praise and hearty thanks for all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and fear, Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, and all others, whom Thou hast delivered from the miseries of this wretched world, from the body of death and all temptation, and who have committed their souls into Thy holy hands, as into sure consolation and rest: whose examples teach us to follow.

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document 30 Grant, we beseech Thee, that we, with them, may fully receive Thy promises, and be made perfect altogether, and being set on Thy right hand in the place where there is neither weeping, sorrow, nor heaviness, may hear those most sweet and comfortable words—Come to Me, ye blessed of My Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world. The 100th Psalm was then sung by the assembled multitude, the band taking the instrumental part, after which the Lord Bishop gave the blessing, and the procession moved back to the Province Hall and dispersed. Source: William Ketchum, The Most Reverend John Medley (St. John: J. and A. McMillan, 1893), 70–74.

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Excerpt from Benjamin Cronyn, “Objections . . . to the Teaching of Trinity College” (1862) At the meeting of the Corporation of Trinity College which was held on the 18th of February last, I proposed the following resolution:— “Whereas two letters have been recently published by the Provost of Trinity College, avowedly with the approval and under the authority of this Corporation, and whereas, these letters, contain many things which appear to a large number of the members of this Church throughout the country to be highly objectionable, and whereas, the approval of this Corporation thus claimed for these letters is calculated to alienate the minds of the people from this University, and to destroy all confidence in it, as a sound and safe institution for the education of the youth of our church in the protestant principles of the Church of England; therefore, be it resolved, that this Corporation regrets that these letters should have been published as by its authority, and desires distinctly to record that it does not hold itself responsible for the opinions maintained in these letters.” . . . When at the request of the Executive Committee of the Synod of my diocese, I addressed a letter to them in August, 1860, setting forth the grounds upon which I had formed my opinion upon the teaching of Trinity College, the only documents to which I could refer were the notes which the Students had taken of the lectures delivered to them by the Provost. Several copies of these notes had come under my notice, and they agreed so entirely in all important points that I could not resist the conclusion that I had before me a correct statement of the teaching of the Provost, or at all events a faithful account of the ideas imparted, and of the effects produced upon the minds of the Students by the teaching to which they had been subjected. . . . The Provost has, indeed, denied the accuracy of these notes, and refuses to be held responsible for them; but as he has published three letters in reply to my charges, addressed to the Lord Bishop of Toronto in which he has fully stated his views, I now appeal to his pub-

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document 30 lished opinions in proof that the Theological teaching of Trinity College is dangerous to the young men who are subjected to it. . . . The first subject to which I would advert, is the undue exaltation of the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of our Lord. The Inspired writers of the New Testament have said but little of the Virgin Mary, as if the Holy Spirit foresaw and designed to discountenance beforehand the superstition and idolatry which, through this door, afterwards found entrance into the Church of God. The little which is said of the Virgin is not calculated, in any wise, to exalt her, above the level of a creature, or to encourage superstitious feelings concerning her. Our Church has wisely followed the example thus set by the Inspired writers. All that she has taught upon this subject may be summed up in one brief sentence. Christ was born of a pure virgin. The Provost has gone far beyond this in his teaching, and the effect upon the minds of Students has been to make them believe that the answers in the manuscript notes which they had compiled were in accordance with the views put forth by him. They—one and all—believed that they had been taught that Mary had an appointed type in the law, and that she was “an instrument in bringing mankind into the Kingdom of Heaven.” The Provost, in his pamphlet, page 25, says:—“I consider this latter clause to be open to very dangerous constructions, as it might be understood to imply some past or permanent ministry of the Blessed Virgin, tending immediately to the salvation of mankind.” This is precisely the opinion which I have formed and expressed concerning this answer. The Provost says he did not teach this. I, of course, believe him. But the Students must have supposed that he did teach it, for where else could they have learned it?—not from the Holy Scriptures—not in the Church Catechism—not in the Creed—not from their parents and friends. They believed that they learned this from the Provost in his lectures, and therefore they all entered it in their notes. While, therefore, I must credit the Provost’s denial, still I must regard that teaching as singularly defective and most dangerous, which could lead intelligent Students to suppose that the Provost intended to teach that which he now so emphatically repudiates as open to “very dangerous construction.” . . . With reference to the probable intercession of departed Saints for us, the Provost states, in page 92 of his pamphlet: “I must still do as I have ever done, speak of it as a probable opinion, not as a truth revealed to us in Holy Scripture.” Upon his own admission, then, he stands, as a teacher of youth in the Church of England, inculcating, as probably true, a doctrine not found in the Word of God, and on which the Church is entirely silent!!—Whether the intercession of departed Saints for us be a probable and pious opinion, may well be questioned. Whatever may be the sentiments of some who have ventured rashly to speculate upon things which are not revealed, and have professed to be wise above what is written; of this fact the Provost cannot be ignorant that there are in the Church many able Divines who regard it not only as unwarranted by the word of God but repugnant to it as a vain conceit and derogatory to the Redeem-

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document 30 er’s glory. And I cannot but consider it dangerous to young men thus to be led off the track laid down by the Church in a Romeward direction, more especially in times like the present when we have beheld large numbers of our clergy and laity forsaking the Scriptural Church of their fathers and falling victims to the corruptions and idolatries of the Church of Rome. And most, if not all, of these men commenced their downward course by just such rash speculations upon unrevealed subjects as the Provost has been in the habit of bringing before the students of Trinity College. The next point to which I have objected in the teaching of the Provost, is, his doctrine concerning priestly absolution. The Provost holds and teaches the highest and most ultra view concerning the power of the priest to forgive sins which has ever been taught even in the Church of Rome. In the 94th page of his pamphlet he thus expresses himself: “Respecting remission of sins I must teach as I have ever done. Did I not believe as I do, I trust that I should not be still consenting to the act of past years, when I knelt before the Bishop and received, in the solemn words of our ordinal, authority to execute the office of a Priest in the Church of God. What mean these words? or are they idle words ? “Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained.” From this it might appear that the Provost thinks that these words of Scripture, quoted in our ordinal, would be “idle” if not interpreted absolutely without any condition, limitation, or exception. But in page 29 of his pamphlet we find the following explanation of the power of the keys, and of the limitation and exceptions which must be understood when the words of our Blessed Lord are employed in the ordinal:—“True repentance which cannot exist apart from true faith in Christ is presupposed as the indispensable qualification of the recipient of the pardon which God is then asserted to bestow in the Church through the authoritative, yet simply ministerial absolution of the minister, which takes effect, not at his [the minister’s] pleasure, but according to the genuineness of the repentance of those to whom it is ministered.” From this we learn that the Provost does limit the words of the ordinal, but that still he regards the absolution of the Priest as not merely declarative, but as effectual and necessary before pardon is recorded in heaven. If this is the “honest conviction” of the Provost, as he states, he is right to hold his opinion, but I cannot but regard it as dangerous that such views of judicial, effectual priestly absolution should be taught in an institution of the Church. “Our Church teaches that God hath given power and commandment to his ministers to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their sins.” And in the exercise of this power they are to declare that “God pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent and unfeignedly believe his Holy Gospel.” Thus does the Church (in the daily offices of the Book of Common Prayer) interpret the words of the ordinal. The sinner who truly repents and believes the Gospel is fully pardoned and accepted by God; his sins and iniquities are blotted out for ever. The

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document 30 minister has power and authority to declare this for the comfort of the believer, and for the strengthening of his faith. How different is this from the power which the Provost and his authorities claim for the Priest, of pardoning effectually the sins of the penitent believer before they are pardoned of God. . . . The next point which I would notice in the teaching of the Provost is his doctrine concerning the sacraments. As to the number of the sacraments, I think it dangerous for our youth to be taught that there are two “great sacraments” and other holy rites and sacraments, when our Church dogmatically teaches in the catechism that there are “two only.” And in the articles, “there are two sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say Baptism and the Supper of the Lord.” And that these five commonly called sacraments, that is to say confession, penance, orders, matrimony and extreme unction, are not to be counted for sacraments of the Gospel. Whatever may be said concerning the ancient use of the word “sacrament,” since the Reformation the word has had but one application in our Church, and it cannot be regarded as either wise or safe to lead our young men to look upon other rites and ceremonies as at all to be placed on the same footing as the only two sacraments which Christ has ordained. . . . With reference to the nature and office of the sacraments the Provost’s views are open to the same objection. Our Church teaches that the sacraments are outward signs of inward grace and seals to those who truly repent and believe in God’s mercy and favor towards them. The Provost evidently regards them in quite a different light. He quotes a passage from Waterland in his third letter to the Bishop of Toronto, which, he says, he had read to his class, in which the following view of baptism is given: “Are we not all of us, or nearly all, [ten thousand to one] baptised in infancy, and therefore regenerated and justified of course.” The doctrine of baptismal justification is that against which our Reformers most strenuously contended, as the root of many of the doctrinal errors in the Church of Rome. The XI. article of our Church teaches that “we are accounted righteous (justified) before God only for the merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, &c.” And in the Homily on the salvation of mankind we read that man is justified “freely by faith in Christ,” and that “faith doth directly send us to Christ for remission of our sins.” Yet the Provost propounds the opinion, and adduces sundry quotations from the writings of fallible men to prove that all baptised persons are justified, and that though out Church teaches that faith sends us directly to Christ for the remission of our sins; still, “the doctrine of justification by faith, rightly understood, is not inconsistent with the statement that faith sends us to Christ for the remission of our sins through sacraments and ordinances of his appointment.” . . . With reference to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the Provost has explained his views in a passage which occurs in pp. 76–77 of his pamphlet. “Before the charge, or rather the insinuation, of the Bishop of Huron, I should have thought it quite unnecessary to explain to any one that I do not understand by

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document 30 the ‘glorified humanity’ of our Lord anything which can be orally received; nor again do I understand, when Mr. Proctor says that ‘every faithful recipient there partakes of Christ’s glorified humanity,’ that he dreams of any local presence of this heavenly gift in or with the earthly elements, but means simply that in faithfully receiving the sign, we surely receive the thing signified. By the word there, I understand, as the Bishop of Huron seems to have done, in the sacrament, and by the sacrament, not the outward, material sign, but the holy celebration.” From this explanation it is very difficult to collect what view the Provost really entertains concerning the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. But he has quoted in page 87 of his pamphlet a charge of the Bishop of St. David’s, in which his Lordship altogether condemns the propositions of Archdeacon Denison concerning this Sacrament. I therefore conclude that the Provost agrees with his Lordship in repudiating the doctrine taught by the Archdeacon. In that charge I find some wise and judicious remarks concerning the use of the term ‘the real presence.’ His Lordship says, “The phrase real presence is foreign to the language of the Church of England, and has been wisely avoided as liable to abuse, and likely to deceive or scandalize the simple and ignorant.” It must be apparent to all that the term which the Provost has employed, from the writings of Mr. Proctor, and has so vehemently defended, “that every faithful recipient partakes, in the Eucharist of the glorified humanity of our Lord” is much more likely to deceive and scandalize the simple and ignorant and should therefore be regarded as dangerous and avoided in lectures addressed to young men on the Catechism. The Provost had quoted this charge with the highest commendation as exactly stating his own views, and in it we find language employed which is capable of being interpreted so as to express and support a view of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament which is not in accordance with the teaching of our Church. . . . The times in which we live demand a caution which at another period might not be necessary. There is a strong tide of opinion, more especially amongst the young, setting towards those false doctrines and erroneous practices from which our forefathers at the Reformation freed the Church, and it is our duty to endeavour by the use of every legitimate means to save those placed under our direction from being carried away by the haste and rashness of youth towards the Gulf in which so many have made shipwreck of the faith. In my letter of August 1860, I incidentally mentioned that I had heard from Students of Trinity College the statement, that “the Church of England lost at the Reformation some things which were in themselves good and tended to edification.” “The Provost in his 1st letter page 24th of his pamphlet meets this, as he says, with a flat denial of its truth,” in plain English, he pronounces it a falsehood. Yet in his second letter, page 34, we find however the following passage. “I have never indulged in maudlin regrets respecting the losses we sustained at the reformation and there can be no possible colour for the charge, except it be that, in reading of admirable early usages, which our Reformers did not venture to

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document 31 restore, such as that mentioned by Justin Martyr, the conveyance of the consecrated elements to all sick members of the Church after every public celebration of the Eucharist I have said that we might well regret that we possessed not this usage in our Church, but that our regret should be controlled by the remembrance that a necessary consequence of the grievous abuses which preceded the reformation was to abridge our liberty, and to deprive us of “good things which might have been safely enjoyed in happier times.” It is not to be wondered at that Students hearing such statements as the above should come to the conclusion that “at the reformation, our Church lost some good things.” . . . The Clergy of the Church of England are bound “so to minister the doctrine and sacraments and the discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded, and as this Church and realm hath received the same.” I cannot but regard it as dangerous to lead young men to look back to the Church in the period before the reformation as possessing “admirable usages” which our Reformers could not venture to restore and as then enjoying “good things” of which we are now deprived. . . . I have thus presented my objections to the teaching of the Provost of Trinity College. This Corporation is the only tribunal before which these charges can with propriety be brought; as a Clergyman of the Church of England, Mr. Whitaker is not under my jurisdiction, not being in my diocese, and therefore it would be not only absurd, but highly presumptuous in me, to present charges against him before any Ecclesiastical tribunal, and thus to interfere with the duties of another Bishop. But as Provost of this University, he is subject to my supervision, and when I think there is in his conduct or teaching any thing which calls for investigation, this is the only tribunal to which I can, with propriety, appeal. The Law has invested us, as a body, with plenary power to deal with all matters which concern the interests of the University, and I can never consent to throw upon others the responsibility of doing that which we are capable of doing, and which we alone are, by law, authorized to do. London, May 1862. benj. huron. Source: Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 22967.

Document 31 John Travers Lewis, “The Ottawa Malcontents and the Archbishop of Ontario” (1895) (Complete) On Monday, March 25th, 1895, being the 33rd anniversary of the Archbishop’s consecration, the following address was presented to His Grace after Divine Service in the Cathedral, Kingston, Ont.:—

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document 31 to the most reverend john travers lewis, d.d., dc., lord archibishop of ontario and metropolitan of canada: May it please Your Grace: To-day as you commemorate the thirty-third anniversary of your consecration as Bishop of Ontario, your Clergy desire to congratulate you most heartily upon having been spared to discharge, for so exceptionally long a period, the duties of your sacred office. Of those who were Bishops of the Anglican Communion within the limits of the British Empire at the time of your consecration, only one is now engaged in active work. Your Grace has seen the number of your clergy grow from 55 to 135; of parishes, from 48 to 113; of congregations, from 91 to 281. Over 35,000 persons have received at your hands the Apostolic Rite of Confirmation. Besides the spiritual growth which these figures indicate, the material progress of the Church in this Diocese under Your Grace’s administration has been equally marked, the number of Churches having increased from 70 to 230, and of parsonage houses from 19 to 84; while the contributions to Diocesan Funds have steadily advanced from year to year throughout this whole period. But more gratifying than even this progress has been the happy disappearance of party feeling in your Diocese and the growing unity of spirit amongst clergy and laity as exemplified in Synodical and Parochial work. For many years past, all have worked harmoniously together, sacrificing no principle but recognizing the duty and the benefit of united action. It is a matter for deep regret that efforts have recently been made to destroy this unity; and we desire to express as strongly as possible our disapproval and condemnation of the means employed to accomplish this end, namely, the misrepresentation of your action in declining to be dictated to as to the terms upon which you would accept candidates for holy orders; your offence being that you yourself prescribe the conditions of acceptance instead of allowing the applicant to do so. Your Grace’s practice is merely what every Bishop does, and must do if a Bishop is to have any responsibility whatever regarding candidates for ordination. They must be accepted upon some conditions, and these conditions surely are to be decided by the Bishop and not by the candidate or his friends. So far as our relations with Your Grace are concerned, there is no need to assure you of our entire confidence in your justice, impartiality, and liberality of mind; but knowing how industriously misrepresentations of your action are being circulated throughout the Diocese, we feel that we, who know you best, ought to declare ourselves. With every good wish and prayer for your well-being, and that of the Church under your care, We remain, your faithful Clergy. [Signed by 110 clergy of the diocese.]

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the archbishop’s reply. Reverend and Dear Brethren: It is with gratitude to Almighty God that I desire to acknowledge His great mercies to me on this day when I enter on the thirty-fourth year of my Episcopate, and also to express my thanks to you individually—my heart-felt appreciation of the kindness that has prompted your congratulatory address. I join with you in thankfulness for the progress the Diocese has made in things spiritual and temporal, as indicated by the statistics you bring forward, and I pray that such progress may be maintained in the future, as it will assuredly be if the unity and co-operation which have hitherto made the Diocese conspicuous be not interrupted by the reckless agitation lately sprung up in Ottawa. It is a misfortune that you should feel constrained to take notice of it, but I do not see how it could have been avoided when your Bishop was so falsely and I fear maliciously slandered. For the last two months, owing to illness and partial loss of sight, I have been unable to read or write, and therefore I was for a time ignorant of the real character of the meeting held in St. George’s school house, Ottawa. At first I thought that it might have resembled that of Demetrius at Ephesus, of which St. Luke gives us this description: “Some, therefore, cried one thing and some another: for the assembly was confused; and the more part knew not wherefore they were come together.” But I know now that the Ottawa meeting was worse than that of Ephesus. It was a wicked attempt to impose on the dupes there assembled. The prominent charge against me was that I had said that “I never would ordain a Wycliffe student.” This was a base fabrication. I never said a word or wrote a line to that effect. I am not given to making sweeping assertions or declarations of policy which I know may have to be modified or changed under changed circumstances of the future. If the rioters at the meeting had charged me with the following misdemeanor they would have been strictly accurate, viz., that I withstood the insolent demand of a priest in Ottawa that I should admit to examination for Holy Orders three years hence a candidate of his selection on his conditions and not on mine. His followers, no doubt, are ignorant that it is the prerogative of all Bishops to ordain on their own conditions, not on those of irresponsible friends of candidates for Holy Orders,—a prerogative I am not likely to resign at the bidding of a meeting which has shocked every right-minded Christian. It may be well to make plain to you my attitude towards Wycliffe College. Up to the present time I have never made any public statement on the subject, nor exhibited the least hostility to the college, though I never viewed its establishment with favour. Ever since I could reason on such subjects I disliked the multiplication of small Theological Seminaries. I believe that they beget narrowness which ends in bigotry. This is inevitable when young men of a certain theological stripe are hived together to be moulded to order by professors as

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document 31 narrow as themselves. The policy of the first Bishops of Canada, like Bishops Mountain and Strachan, was to concentrate the strength of the Church on the establishment of one or two great Universities where Theological students should be educated in the same buildings with students in Arts, as in the great Universities in England and Ireland. This course of action, if adopted, would ensure less bigotry, abler professors, larger libraries, and more spacious buildings. Wycliffe College, being an additional Theological Seminary, and in my opinion quite unnecessary, was therefore regarded by me with disfavour, especially by reason of the object sought to be attained by its erection, which was avowedly the overthrow of Trinity University, and that by the use of means which I shall not mention as I wish to avoid controversy. I have been identified with Trinity College from the day of its foundation. I know its full history. I have fought its battles, and by virtue of seniority of consecration am now the Chairman of its Corporation. Is it not then too much to ask of even archiepiscopal good nature that I should view with equal esteem and favour a College intended to spring into popularity out of the ruins of Trinity College? But this is not the only ground for my dislike to Wycliffe College. I seriously object to some of the text-books used there, notably and as a specimen Hatch’s Bampton Lectures, a book characterized by my dear friend the late Bishop of Lincoln in my hearing as a gross perversion of the object sought to be attained by the founder of those lectures, the Rev. John Bampton. I also object to it as an authorized “book of reference” for candidates for Holy Orders. But further, I disagree with a great deal of the theological teaching given in Wycliffe College. I give as an illustration the following passage taken from the Calendar of the College. Among the “Distinctive Principles” of this College is “An Historical Episcopate traceable to Apostolic direction, as conducive to the well-being but not necessary to the being of the Church.” This I believe to be a fiction without a particle of support from the New Testament, primitive antiquity, or the Book of Common Prayer. It is a device manufactured by well-meaning but puzzle-headed people in order to escape from the dilemma of unchurching sects. But the device is insulting. It seems to say to those that are not members of the Church: “You have an existence, it is true, but not a good one. You are in what is called the esse of a Church, but not the bene esse,”—just as if the Apostles had transmitted to us a choice of Churches of various grades of orthodoxy— as if the Catholic Church was like a railway train made up of first and secondclass carriages—and as if any sensible Christian would not prefer to be a member of a body that had a good constitution, to remaining a member of one that had merely a claim to existence! Now I do not believe a word of this figment, and I prefer that those ordained by me should disbelieve it also. It is very painful to me to be forced to enter upon this subject at all. My intention has always been to let Wycliffe College alone to work out its own future. I have felt and still feel that it may be destined to do good. Candidates for

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document 32 Holy Orders trained there, or some of them, will no doubt revise opinions gained there when they have had more experience and a wider range of reading, instances of which are not wanting. For this and other reasons it was my desire to say nothing to its disparagement; but the provocation has been too great to permit me to be silent. The insults offered to myself would not have elicited a remark from me, but I must notice those offered to our brethren in Ottawa. When men of high standing and long service in the Church, like Archdeacon Lauder and Rural Deans Bogert and Pollard, are hissed down because they manfully endeavoured to say a word in defence of their absent Bishop, a righteous anger must be felt. I tender to them my sympathy and promise them my firm support. They may have to withstand further opposition from the organization that has been framed to perpetuate discord; but they may rest assured that the good sense of the Church of England will never allow a club of selfconstituted theologians, either in Ottawa or elsewhere, to regulate the affairs of the Church by usurping the functions of our General and Provincial Synods, and substituting for the canons and immemorial usages of the Church the resolutions of intimidation meetings where freedom of speech is not permitted and Evangelical religion is caricatured. Meanwhile let us continue in the old paths and work on in faith; and, as that really Evangelical prelate, the Bishop of Winchester, said when threatened with an action at law by a candidate whom he rejected for his ignorance, “I sleep in peace.” Believe me, ever yours affectionately in the bonds of the Church, J. T. Ontario. Source: Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, Ottawa, no. 52925.

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Document 32 Excerpt from Dyson Hague, “The History of the Higher Criticism” In the first place, the critics who were the leaders [of the higher criticism], the men who have given name and force to the whole movement, have been men who have based their theories largely upon their own subjective conclusions. They have based their conclusions largely upon the very dubious basis of the author’s style and supposed literary qualifications. Everybody knows that style is a very unsafe basis for the determination of a literary product. The greater the writer the more versatile his power of expression; and anybody can understand that the Bible is the last book in the world to be studied as a mere classic by mere human scholarship without any regard to the spirit of sympathy and reverence on the part of the student. The Bible, as has been said, has no revelation to make to un-Biblical minds. It does not even follow that because a man is a philological expert he is able to understand the integrity or credibility of a passage of Holy Scripture any more than the beauty and spirit of it.

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document 32 The qualification for the perception of Biblical truth is neither philosophic nor philological knowledge, but spiritual insight. The primary qualification of the musician is that he be musical; of the artist, that he have the spirit of art. So the merely technical and mechanical and scientific mind is disqualified for the recognition of the spiritual and infinite. Any thoughtful man must honestly admit that the Bible is to be treated as unique in literature, and, therefore, that the ordinary rules of critical interpretation must fail to interpret it aright. In the second place; some of the most powerful exponents of the modern Higher Critical theories have been Germans, and it is notorious to what length the German fancy can go in the direction of the subjective and of the conjectural. For hypothesis-weaving and speculation, the German theological professor is unsurpassed. . . . The learned professor of Assyriology at Oxford said that the investigation of the literary source of history has been a peculiarly German pastime. It deals with the writers and readers of the ancient Orient as if they were modern German professors, and the attempt to transform the ancient Israelites into somewhat inferior German compilers, proves a strange want of familiarity with Oriental modes of thought. (Sayce, “Early History of the Hebrews,” pages 108–112.) In the third place, the dominant men of the movement were men with a strong bias against the supernatural. This is not an ex-parte statement at all. It is simply a matter of fact, as we shall presently show. Some of the men who have been most distinguished as the leaders of the Higher Critical movement in Germany and Holland have been men who have no faith in the God of the Bible, and no faith in either the necessity or the possibility of a personal supernatural revelation. The men who have been the voices of the movement, of whom the great majority, less widely known and less influential, have been mere echoes; the men who manufactured the articles the others distributed, have been notoriously opposed to the miraculous. We must not be misunderstood. We distinctly repudiate the idea that all the Higher Critics were or are anti-supernaturalists. Not so. The British-American School embraces within its ranks many earnest believers. What we do say, as we will presently show, is that the dominant minds which have led and swayed the movement, who made the theories that the others circulated, were strongly unbelieving. Then the higher critical movement has not followed its true and original purposes in investigating the Scriptures for the purposes of confirming faith and of helping believers to understand the beauties, and appreciate the circumstances of the origin of the various books, and so understand more completely the Bible? No. It has not; unquestionably it has not. It has been deflected from that, largely owing to the character of the men whose ability and forcefulness have given predominance to their views. It has become identified with a system of criticism which is based on hypotheses and suppositions which have for their object the repudiation of the traditional theory, and has investigated the ori-

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document 33 gins and forms and styles and contents, apparently not to confirm the authenticity and credibility and reliability of the Scriptures, but to discredit in most cases their genuineness, to discover discrepancies, and throw doubt upon their authority. . . . The desire to receive all the light that the most fearless search for truth by the highest scholarship can yield is the desire of every true believer in the Bible. No really healthy Christian mind can advocate obscurantism. The obscurant who opposes the investigation of scholarship, and would throttle the investigators, has not the spirit of Christ. In heart and attitude he is a Mediaevalist. To use Bushnell’s famous apologue, he would try to stop the dawning of the day by wringing the neck of the crowing cock. No one wants to put the Bible in a glass case. But it is the duty of every Christian who belongs to the noble army of truth-lovers to test all things and to hold fast that which is good. He also has rights even though he is, technically speaking, unlearned, and to accept any view that contradicts his spiritual judgment simply because it is that of a so-called scholar, is to abdicate his franchise as a Christian and his birthright as a man. (See that excellent little work by Professor Kennedy, “Old Testament Criticism and the Rights of the Unlearned,” F. H. Revell.) And in his right of private judgment he is aware that while the privilege of investigation is conceded to all, the conclusions of an avowedly prejudiced scholarship must be subjected to a peculiarly searching analysis. The most ordinary Bible reader is learned enough to know that the investigation of the Book that claims to be supernatural by those who are avowed enemies of all that is supernatural, and the study of subjects that can be understood only by men of humble and contrite heart by men who are admittedly irreverent in spirit, must certainly be received with caution. . . .

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Source: Dyson Hague, “The History of the Higher Criticism,” The Fundamentals (N.p., [1910]): 1: 87–122 passim.

Document 33 Excerpts from H. J. Cody, “Sermon” (March 5, 1934) Isaiah 64:2, “Lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes.” 1. We gather to-night in thousands to offer our heartfelt thanksgiving to God for his good hand upon this our City of Toronto during the hundred years that are past; humbly to confess our shortcomings and mistakes, which, we hope, have taught us lessons of wisdom; gratefully to commemorate the courageous citizens who launched this experiment of municipal government; frankly to face the problems of a period of world-wide depression and to take stock of our human and material resources; and with full purpose afresh to dedicate ourselves and our city to the God of our fathers who is also the God of their succeeding race. In the sight of the Eternal how short are a hundred years: “Even a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night.” . . .

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document 33

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The words of our text, “Lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes,” were spoken by a Hebrew prophet to his fellow countrymen in exile and depression. They express a passionate conviction that a better time will come. With unconquerable faith in God’s purpose the prophet calls his people to prepare for a splendid destiny. “Enlarge the place of thy tent. Lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes.” Every camper knows the meaning of the figure. When you pitch a tent, if the larger structure requires longer cords, you must strengthen the tentpegs that hold them fast. Make ready, cries the seer, for the glorious days in store, enlarge the place of thy tent, lengthen the cords; and fail not to strengthen the stakes. Increased extension calls for increased stability. Seek a wider domain, carry on your policy of expansion, but you can do this safely only if you strengthen the things that are basic and steady. Reach out and dig down. Grow wider but grow deeper. Expand, but confirm. III. This principle of thought and action applies (a) to the Kingdom of God in every age. Be not content with narrow boundaries; win new realms for God; seek to bring ever wider spheres of human life under the sway of God’s will; take no contracted view of the scope of true religion; keep the mind open to receive whatever truths God may reveal or develop from age to age. But see to it that this process of lengthening the cords is accompanied by a strengthening of the stakes, by deeper grasp of fundamental verities, and by more unfaltering loyalty to the Living Lord. (b) This principle may be illustrated also in personal life. We lengthen our cords by being aggressive and progressive, vigorous and dynamic. But do we strengthen our stakes by possessing poise and balance, steadfastness and stability? Every survey of the history of the individual or the nation bears witness to the moral fact that if noble character is to be created and maintained, staunchness must be increased, as strain is extended. If the tree of man’s life grows upward and outward his roots of principle and conviction must more deeply grasp the steadfast earth. What collapses have we seen of lives that are over-extended but undeepened, vigorously active but morally unstable. Extend, if you will, the area of usefulness and service, but drive more deeply into the good soil the stake of a strengthened inner life. It has well been said that “we shall see no great further advance in public righteousness without a great advance in personal holiness.” . . . In things material that concern the lives of our citizens we have wonderfully lengthened our cords in the last hundred years. We have grown from strength to strength. We have passed from the wigwam to the skyscraper; from the birch-bark canoe to the steamer, the railway, the motor-car, and the aeroplane. The mounted messenger and the stage coach have been superseded by the telephone, the telegraph and the mysterious radio. The little agricultural fair has ripened into the

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document 33 world-renowned Canadian National Exhibition. The place of barter and business for the immediate neighbourhood has grown into a national centre of industry and finance. . . . We have verily lengthened our cords in every direction from the stormy days of Mayor William Lyon Mackenzie and Archdeacon Strachan. . . . But the crucial problem remains unchanged; how may human beings live together securely, nobly, happily? Of what avail is our modern knowledge if it does not save us from personal moral defeat and social catastrophe? Of what avail our modern science if it brings us power that can be used to destroy the works of our hands and the heritage of our children? What avails our marvellous wealth-producing laboursaving machinery if in the midst of material plenty thousands are thrown out of work and compelled to beg or starve? Has our modern culture achieved its end if it leaves us over-sophisticated, cynical and in despair? Our boasted progress is but sounding brass and tinkling cymbal if it only leads our civilization to chaos and death. . . . If our cords are lengthened are our stakes strengthened? Have we all the while deepened our trust in the general moral verities of life and increased our faith in God? Have we sought first material possessions at whatever cost, or have we sought first justice, brotherhood, peace and love, in the belief that only by so seeking shall we be able to build securely the necessary economic foundation for all man’s higher life? . . . But tonight we are also looking forward to the new century of our life in which we are so soon to enter. . . . We are beckoned forward by the revelation “of the holy City, New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven.” Here is the divine ideal for the realization of which we are bidden to strive and plan and pray. For this future what are our ideals? May we not seek to realise a commercial ideal under which wealth need not be base or vulgar, but shall be held in trust from God to be equitably distributed and nobly used in the service of humanity? May we not realise an industrial ideal under which head and heart and hand and savings may work together in harmony rendering to each his due and to all the best of which they are capable? May we not realise a social ideal that will not destroy the initiative, the ambition, or the characteristics of the individual, but will combine these with the effort to serve the whole society? Which will conserve both freedom and organic unity? May we not realise an educational ideal that will make citizenship intelligent and workmanship effective; that will prepare citizens to solve national problems and that will develop a spirit of sane patriotism? Shall we not realise a political ideal that will call forth honesty, interest and clarity of thought from the members of our democratic state? Shall we not realise a moral ideal that will unite Plato’s idea of justice, that

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document 34 is the proper filling of one’s own place, and St. Paul’s idea of love, the regard for the other man? Shall we not realise a religious ideal that will create goodness of character that will vindicate the inherent worth of every man and strengthen him against the tyranny of the many; that will deepen his sense of responsibility to God and man in the exercise of his various rights and the discharge of his various duties, and that will emphasise his obligations to serve and to give more than his claim to dominion and to get? If such ideals can be realised then the City of God will begin to come down from heaven and to be built in our own community, “And the name of the city from that day shall be, “The Lord is there” (Ezek.48:35). . . . Those of our own city who gave all that men can give, life itself, in the great struggle for human freedom and for justice still speak to us with singular authority from the world unseen. They bid us remember that it was by the shedding of blood that our city and country have been maintained in freedom and security, and that the only monument really worthy of their sacrificial devotion is a city pure, brotherly, and God-fearing. As challenged by our living dead, how can we but answer in Blake’s famous words: “I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In all this green and pleasant land.”

May God bless and guide us as we seek to make our loved City of Toronto like unto that City which hath foundations whose builder and maker is God.

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Source: Copy of typescript in Robarts Library, University of Toronto.

Document 34 Excerpts from Eugene R. Fairweather, “Scripture in Tradition” (1959) “No prophetic scripture allows a man to interpret it by himself” (II. Pet. 1: 20). For many Christians this is a hard saying. It may be a commonplace that Scripture is a norm for faith and practice. But what we forget so easily is that this norm—law and prophets, Old Testament and New Testament alike—took shape within a community and expresses the concerns and standards of that community. Yet it is beyond question that Scripture originated within the community of Israel, Old and New, and that it exists to testify to the community’s fundamental faith. It is addressed to believers in community, and the community is the place where we must listen to it if we expect to hear its real message. When we approach the problem of biblical authority, then, we cannot help asking at the outset how that authority is related to the authority of the believing

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document 34 and witnessing Church itself, and whether it is shared with other organs of authority within the Church. We may usefully start by reviewing the essential facts, about which there is fortunately little room for serious argument. While it may not be possible to describe in full detail the respective roles of oral tradition and written document in the development of Scripture as we know it, it is clear that the Hebrew Scriptures are the term of a long process of crystallization of tradition within the community of the Old Covenant, and that their various elements are meant to bear witness in different ways to God’s covenant with Israel and to the faith believed and the life lived by his people within that covenant. Similarly, when the New Covenant has been sealed in the blood of Christ, the Christian witness to God’s re-creative act is formulated in a communal tradition, and it is this tradition, first communicated by word of mouth in the apostolic proclamation of God’s wonderful works in Christ, that is written down, edited, collected, commented upon, in Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Apocalypse. . . . The problem of the relation between the living community and the written monuments of its tradition emerges directly enough from all this, but two further observations may sharpen our awareness of it. On the one hand, the first, prescriptural tradition of the apostolic Church appeals to something already written and venerated, the Scriptures of the Old Testament, as an accepted element in its total witness to Christ. Thus we have the concept of “scripture” ready-made for the Church to take up in the formation of a new canon. On the other hand, the very nature of the New Covenant in Christ points to the reality of a fellowship with God, more perfect than that enjoyed by the “fathers.” Thus, in assessing the role of Scripture in the Church, we shall have to allow for the new significance of the latter as the Spirit-filled community, bearing corporate witness to God’s truth. “This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear” (Acts 2: 32f.). Such a claim suggests that the primitive Church’s fairly explicit idea of biblical authority is matched by a strong sense of the living witness and authority of the Spirit in the Church, which gives new meaning to inherited concepts of oral tradition. . . . We should observe that at the beginning of Christian history authority within the witnessing community belongs primarily to persons rather than to books. The principal agents of the primitive Church’s witness are the apostles. . . . “So then, brethren,” St. Paul writes, “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (II Thess. 2:15). The new and living teaching of the apostolic Church is given in personal communication, sometimes oral, sometimes written, and we have no reason to suppose that even the written tradition is thought of as “Scripture” in any technical sense. As for the primitive Church’s use of the only Scriptures it possessed—the

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document 34 Scriptures of the Old Covenant—it seems fair to say that the possession of these documents did not seriously affect the primacy of “apostolic tradition.” However great the Church’s reverence for them may have been, and however important they were to prove as a precedent for a “New Testament,” their effective authority was significantly qualified by the way in which the Church interpreted them. When the teachers of the New Testament Church appealed to the Old Testament as a witness to the Christian Gospel, the testimony to Christ which these Christians discovered was not something that any casual Jewish reader was likely to find in his Scriptures, whatever the methodological similarities between rabbinic and Christian exegesis. On the contrary, as St. Paul puts it in a statement of what he clearly regards as essential theological principle, “to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away” (II Cor. 3:14). In other words, if there is a witness to Christ in the Old Testament, it is not perceptible in the “letter,” “carnally” read, but must be identified “spiritually” or, as we might say, “typologically.” But this amounts to saying that the apostolic Church only found what it regarded as an adequate understanding of its Scriptures by way of a principle external to the literal, historical meaning of law and prophets. Early Christians had no illusions about the perspicuity of Scripture apart from Tradition! The real basis, then, of the primitive Church’s faith is the direct experience of the chosen witnesses. “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us” (I John 1: 3). It is obvious, however, that the disappearance of direct oral report will have presented a serious problem. . . . As time went on greater attention was inevitably paid to the written record, as the most complete, explicit and reliable embodiment of the apostolic paradosis. By the last quarter of the second century we have evidence for the existence of an almost complete New Testament collection, acknowledged as an authoritative repository of the apostolic witness. Our evidence also suggests, however, that other repositories of that witness were still recognized. Side by side with the apostolic Scriptures, our most articulate informants place the apostolic rule of faith and the apostolic Bishops in the apostolic Churches. Irenaeus, for example, not only testifies to the fourfold Gospel, but also emphasizes the unity of faith maintained in the Churches apart from the written Word and appeals to the continuous witness of the apostolic Churches, embodied in the succession of their chief pastors and teachers (AH, I, 10, 1–2; III, 1–4; III, 11, 8). This kind of evidence seems to point to two conclusions. (a) The same age which testifies to the canon of apostolic Scripture also claims authority for the apostolic Church, and more particularly for its apostolic Ministry. (b) The writers of this age do not so much as hint that the canon, once defined, will exclude all exercise of authority by this second inheritor of the apostolic witness and commission. On the contrary, they insist that the apostolic Scriptures must be interpreted in the context of a larger apostolicity, from which they are essentially inseparable. The real basis of the Church’s faith

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document 35 remains the witness of the apostolate in the Church, and this witness has more than one organ of expression. . . . No doubt there is a sense in which not only Scripture, but also credal rule of faith, sacramental signs and ministerial order, are over the Church, in so far as they represent an apostolic heritage to which the faith and worship and polity of the ongoing Church must be consistently faithful. Nonetheless, all these primary Christian institutions are given to us in and with the Church, whose common life they help to form; they have no meaning apart from that common life; and no one of them can be exclusively elevated above the corporate structure of the Church. To set one of them over against the others, instead of seeing them as a functional whole, is to ignore the lessons of the Church’s primitive historical development, while to lift any one of them out of its proper place in the Church’s common life is in effect to separate the Church from Christ its Head, who speaks to it in its Scriptures, renews its life in its Sacraments, and orders it by its Ministry. . . . I am simply suggesting that we should follow the analogy of the New Testament Church’s treatment of the Old Testament, and look for the God-given sense and direction of Scripture in those crucial themes of the New Testament message which have found a continuation in the Catholic Creed and other expressions of the Church’s living mind. In one way or another all of us who recognize the authority of that strange and diverse compilation which we call the Bible are going to do our best to find the unity of Spirit beneath the diversity of the letter. Which, then, is better: to import our private visions of unity on the diversity of the text, or to rely on the guidance of the Paraclete in that fellowship of the Holy Spirit through which God has given us the lively oracles of the New Covenant?

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Source: Canadian Journal of Theology 5 (1959): 7–14.

Document 35 Excerpt from John Webster, “Jesus and the Gospel” (1997) One of the chief themes for the forthcoming Lambeth conference is that the church is “called to live and proclaim the gospel.” As I have pondered that phrase in the course of a bit of writing in preparation for the conference, I have come to think that—however correct its instincts—there is a basic flaw in that formulation of the church’s calling. My suggestion is that the church is not called first of all to live and proclaim the gospel, but to hear the gospel. Of course, if the church really is to be a hearing church it must also live and proclaim the gospel—otherwise it will fall into a hopeless self-deception about its own hearing (Jas. 1:22, 25). But only because it has heard and continues to hear the gospel is the church called to testify to what it hears in life and proclamation. . . . The church hears the gospel in the repeated event of being encountered,

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document 35 accosted, by the word of the gospel as it meets us in the reading of Scripture in the midst of the community of faith and its worship. Hearing the gospel in this way involves repentance and faith. That is, it involves constantly renewed abandonment of what the gospel excludes and embrace of what the gospel offers. Such hearing can never be finished business. Hearing the gospel is not a skill we may acquire nor a material condition in which we may find ourselves, but a spiritual event which happens in prayer for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and in which we are always at the beginning. What does the church hear when it hears the gospel? When we try to define the gospel, we need to resist the temptation to make it into a manageable and relatively tame message, something which can perform useful functions in our religious world, and which we can make our own by annexing it to our own viewpoints or projects. The gospel cannot be owned, or even “known” in any straightforward way, as if it were simply one more helpful piece of religious information. That is not to say that the gospel is vague or indefinite: nothing in the New Testament suggests that the gospel is other than something clearly expressible, with a sharp and perceptible outline and content. But what is perceived and expressed in the gospel is mystery. . . . What is required is a portrait of an encounter and of the two subjects in that encounter. These two subjects are, first, Jesus Christ himself, the Lord of the church who calls the church into being and preserves its life, and, second, the community which is brought into being by his call and is itself as the Spiritproduced response to that call. Jesus Christ. We refer here to Jesus himself, the living one who died and is alive for evermore. This one—he himself in his royal majesty as the Son of God, the humiliated and exalted one who is prophet, priest and king—is the first subject in this encounter. We do not here refer to a Christological principle or doctrine, nor to an idealized reconstruction of what Jesus might have been, nor to some larger or smaller fragment of what Jesus might plausibly have taught. We refer to Jesus himself. What we say of this one is that he is the creator and preserver of the church. He makes the church by encountering it. He brings into being the things that are not. And he does this by his word, his work, and his promise. . . . The community. At its most basic level, therefore, the church is to be defined as assembly around the gospel. “Church” is the event of gathering around the magnetic centre of the good news of Jesus Christ. Its dynamic is derived not primarily from human projects, decisions or undertakings, but from the presence of the breathtakingly new and different reality which is brought about by Jesus himself, the good news of God. . . . “Church” is not a struggle to make something happen, but a lived attempt to make sense of, celebrate and bear witness to what has already been established by God’s grace. . . . Source: Copy of typescript supplied by the author.

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Document 36 Excerpts from Report of the Anglican National Commission (April 1931)

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And so we come to conclusions and recommendations. What opinions have we formed as a result of these long months of travel, conference and observation? What recommendations should we make in the face of all the varied problems and needs of the Church of England in Canada? In this chapter we deal with opinions and conclusions only, reserving for the next chapter our specific recommendations. 1. The Spiritual State of the Church. Our Church faces the problems of religion common to all Christian Communions in our modern civilization. Organized religion, is to some extent, under a cloud. There is a lack of confidence in it on the part of many men of good will. There is an atmosphere of depression, and discouragement abroad in which it is difficult to get a full vision of the urgency and magnitude of the work to be done. To come to our own Church, we are impressed with this atmosphere in the conferences, combined with a wistful and sometimes strong hope that things will be better. It is true that there are many signs of hope and courage, but we are stating what we believe to be a general attitude of many church people, clerical and lay, as we have observed it. We believe it to be a temporary phase, but, we know that it is very general at the present time; we state it thus: This atmosphere produces the inevitable consequences of carping criticism and a “what’s the use” attitude. This critical habit shows itself in a strongly marked tendency of one part of the country or one part of the Church to blame another part, or to attach odium to some department, or to the system itself. The human habit of blaming one’s weakness and errors on someone else runs into church circles. This unhappy attitude constitutes one of the great problems set for our solution. We need to face this squarely. We shall not go forward until we discover its causes and set ourselves to its cure. (a) We need a revival of the sense of religious values. The place of the Church and its mission must be set right in the minds of the people. Too often it appears to them as insufficiently concerned with the larger and more important matters of the life of the community, as being the particular sphere in which the small minded, the narrow, and the impossible may find a place of influence denied them in the larger life of the community. Nothing can remedy these things but a revival of real religion, in which the majesty, power and love of God have the exalted place. “We want more sermons about God.” The glory of the Gospel can alone bring the transformation needed so desperately. Men are crying out for an interpretation of life and destiny. (b) What is the cause to which we are asked to give, for which we are asked to work? These are questions to which this Church in Canada should give its

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document 36 answer. We need to understand why we exist in this land. We disapprove of the multiplying of little churches in our new urban areas. But one reason is that the bulk of our people cannot be trusted to send their children a short distance to Sunday School, or to come themselves unless there is a church at their doors, but will patronize any church that may happen to be near. This calls for real teaching of why we are here, what our heritage is and what our purpose is. We also believe that this vagueness and lack of clear-cut conception of our mission as a Church is one of the causes of that lack of cordiality and fellowship of which we heard complaints. (c) We need a fresh and active sense of religious values in both spiritual and intellectual spheres. In the face of the new atmosphere in which men and women and children live and the new knowledge which is theirs, it seems to them as though we talked another language than that which they know. We must not shut our eyes to the vast changes which have come upon the world. Men now think differently. There is a gulf between their mode of thinking and the language we use. It is true that in a high sense the Church with its transcendental values has ever talked a different language and must continue to do so. Vast changes, nevertheless, have come upon human thought and ways of looking at life. We have before us the great and difficult task of holding to that which is above “the time spirit,” with its ever changing aspects, and of continuing to speak in a language “understood of the people.” The recent Lambeth Conference reminds us that it is of the very genius of our Church to effect a combination between that which is true in the old and that which is true in the new. . . . It is clear that many are unable to combine the old which they have been taught in Sunday School and Church with the new which confronts them in the classroom. Their training has not prepared them for the shock of the new. While some remain unaffected the many flounder in difficulties for some years, or shelve questions which should not be shelved, or drift into agnosticism, or in the case of a minority, even into atheism. We believe that the training of the Church should fit our boys and girls for life and knowledge, by facing frankly and unafraid the problems of religion, particularly the Bible, its message and meaning for to-day. Questions vital to faith and conduct must not be ignored in religious training. The assumption too often made that the boy or girl must make his or her own attempt to bridge the gap between the new and the old, with a devout hope that the attempt will not be disastrous to faith is wrong and often fraught with dire consequences. Some of the so-called indifference is nothing but a state of mind in which these questions have not been faced, with the result that the truth of the Christian system is deemed so problematical that it is impossible to come to any definite conclusions. We are convinced that this situation must be met by the Church. (d) A revival of interest in the whole question of the clergyman and his training is necessary. . . .

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document 36 The student has to be trained in a profession. The strongest testimony has been produced that there is need for a more thorough training in the technique of that profession. The conduct of services, the use of the voice, the science of teaching, the equipment of the student with the tools with which he must work, the ability to meet men, the handling of people, organization of groups, these are things which have been constantly stressed. But the student is more than a professional man. He is a man of God, expert in the things of God. He must be taught to pray, and how to pray. He must be a man who knows God and who is growing in the knowledge of God, and is becoming, through the years, more expert in imparting that knowledge to others. The strongest stress is necessary on the devotional life of the candidate if he is to stand the long pull of the years. He must know his religion. But he must be a man in modern life, alive to the problems and difficulties of the age in which he lives. While he holds his convictions strongly he must retain the open mind, “to hear what the Spirit saith to the Churches.” He must be a student of Canadian life and of the people of Canada. Above all he must be versed in the ways of the Church in this land. . . .

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The System. Reference has been made, more than once, to the system. There can be no doubt that the Anglican system as it obtains in this land has failed to achieve results commensurate with the money and effort expended. We have been struck with the various local reasons advanced for the failure of the Church in a given locality. That failure is too general to be thus explained. We have been told that the Church has failed here because teaching has been too definite, and there because it has not been definite enough. In one place it has failed because there has been nothing but preaching of an emotional type, and in another because dry and uninteresting teaching methods prevailed. In one place because the clergy did not stay long enough, in another because they stayed too long. In one place there is too much stress on the music and in another too little. In one place too expensive equipment, in another too little equipment. In one place too much assistance from outside in early days, and in another too little. In one place someone paid for the Church and gave the buildings, etc., and in another the people had to do it all themselves. In one place a rich man footed the bills, and in another there were no men of wealth. And so on—almost without end—excuses of the greatest variety, and mutually destructive. In the face of this we believe that the system does not work as it should, and that radical changes should be made in it as quickly as may be. To give one illustration of that which is in our minds; while there is no doubt that, given a good building, proper equipment, organ, choir, etc., and the right kind of clergyman, our Church and its system in a city or large town, will hold its own and more, with all other Communions—there can be no doubt that it does not work equally well in country places

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document 37 and many small towns. It does not grow and, indeed, for the most part, does not hold its own. Throughout this land the Church of England in Canada has in general a most precarious foothold in the rural areas. Priority of occupation does not affect the case. In many instances our Church was first on the ground, but has failed to win any considerable section of the community, and in many other cases has led a halting existence; this in spite of a long line of devoted clergy, and consistent service. It is from such facts as these that the call comes for a readaptation of the system, especially in the rural and missionary areas. The Prayer Book Service in its entirety is not suited to country conditions. The Incumbent’s freehold does not operate in the best interests of the Church. The extension of responsibility to a greater body of laity is vital to its renewed life. . . . Source: Anglican National Commission Report, appendix to General Synod Journal (1931).

Document 37

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Excerpts from Taken for Granted (1967) The present ferment about the ordained ministry—and indeed about Christian ministry in general, which in the long run cannot be divorced from the professional ministry—is activated by two forces. The first is that which might be called the sociological force. . . . [B]ooks, articles, newspaper reports all point to the one thing—and it is to be found in churches of all denominations—that the temper and tempo of modern society are such that the institutional church finds it very difficult to fulfil what it considers to be its work. This work might briefly be defined as caring pastorally for the population at large. Religious institutions no longer have the power of penetration they once possessed. Religion does not make the impact on society it formerly did. But the winds of change are also blowing from another direction. Theology, subject no doubt to what is happening to the institutional church, is challenging much that was originally held to be sacred and necessary for the Christian life and for the life of the church. Within this second force behind the ferment, old concepts of ministry and priesthood are now held to be in many ways inadequate or unscriptural by the theologians themselves. New theological insights are challenging the old concepts of ministry and are raising questions of the most profound kind. These in turn stem from basic doctrines of the church and its role in society—doctrines which are in the process of being modified or reemphasized. . . . Yet despite all that has been said, which in many respects is common knowledge, there is a lack of scientifically established facts about the state of the Anglican Church of Canada, and in particular about its ministers. . . . Before new departures in the pastoral ministry are embarked upon, therefore, it is important to be reminded of two considerations. The first is that the present situation should be much more accurately assessed than it has been up to now, in an attempt to see precisely what is happening in the ordained ministry at large.

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document 37 Relevant and accurate facts are needed not only to gauge the present but to anticipate the future. And the second consideration is that in proceeding to assess the present we have to begin with the present—with the traditional—with the “given.” We have to start from where we are and we cannot hope to bring about any change of lasting merit until we have begun our operations from the very base at which we are now standing. . . . The Prevalence of Loneliness Probably the most surprising results of the survey emerged from tabulating the answers to the question: “Do you experience loneliness in your work?” (Q.31). Only 3 per cent of the clergy failed to reply to the question. . . . That such a small percentage overlooked the question or failed to answer it is in itself significant. Just under half the clergy (49%) say that they do not experience loneliness in their work, 44% say that they are lonely in their work, and 4% admit they are somewhat lonely. There can be no doubt that the question was looked upon as being important by the parish ministers and that it touched on a matter that was much on their minds. . . .

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Loneliness and Spiritual Development It is worthwhile to determine whether or not some correlation can be established between loneliness and spiritual development. The parish ministers were asked the question: “Are you conscious of not having developed personally or spiritually during recent years?” (Q.56). . . . Of the “lonely” clergy, 86 out of 219 (39%) mention that they have not developed spiritually, whereas among the “nonlonely,” 64 out of 243 (26%) said they had not developed personally and spiritually. . . . Thus, there may be some valid correlation between clergy who report loneliness in their work and those who have failed to develop personally and spiritually, but it would be impossible to determine which is cause and which is effect. However, it may not be too inaccurate a judgment to state that if it were possible to eliminate the loneliness of the clergy, their lives might as a consequence be more healthy personally and spiritually, and this would have its effect on their ministry. . . . The Dangers of Loneliness Psychologists are convinced that the vast majority of human beings cannot endure long spells of loneliness. The existence of loneliness points to potential dangers. It may well break out in forms of behaviour which are socially undesirable, if not criminal. One of many explanations of contemporary social problems is that such problems, or individual examples of them, spring from a deep sense of loneliness. It is frequently suggested that people who are lonely try to overcome their miseries by taking to drink. Others attempt to shake off their loneliness by contracting an early and often disastrous marriage, in which sexual satisfaction is looked upon as one way of dealing with the problem. Yet again,

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it is often said that people will embark upon a life of crime in order to combat their feeling of loneliness. Others try to deal with their problem by adopting neurotic behaviour patterns which, while they may prevent them from embarking upon a life of crime or debauchery or drink, turn them into very inadequate persons. Parish ministers are not exempt from the possibility of adopting socially undesirable behaviour which might be said to spring from loneliness. It would be infantile and hypocritical to suggest that the clergy are immune to these sorts of temptations and most bishops will testify to the fact that they have known clergy who have taken to socially unacceptable or culpable ways of dealing with some basic psychological problem. . . . But strange to relate, little or nothing is being done for the clergy. They who are supposed to help others are without help themselves. If the church wants to offer guidance to society at large, it should begin to offer guidance to its own ministers. . . . Next to loneliness, the most serious complaint of clergy was a poor relationship with their bishop. Some respondents blame unpastoral bishops; some blame diocesan organization. Some want more authoritarian bishops; some want bishops who are less interfering. In organizational matters, “the question of reform for the church is prominent in the minds of the clergy.” Those who do not see the need for change may lack positive idealism, or may have resigned to the status quo, or may be alarmed “that the new trends visible within the church are little more than an abandonment of the historic faith and a denial of the true essence of the church which must stand immutable in the face of a society which is persistently becoming more secular.” But no single issue of reform received even a fifth of the total mentions, indicating an “overwhelming variance of opinion.” Reform of liturgy and reform of national church organization received most responses. Source: W. S. F. Pickering and J. L. Blanchard, Taken for Granted: A Survey of the Parish Clergy of the Anglican Church of Canada (Toronto: General Synod, Anglican Church of Canada, 1967).

Document 38 General Board of Religious Education, “A Basic Statement on the New Curriculum” (1962) (Complete) Significance. We live in a world of social, economic and cultural change. These changes are occurring so rapidly today that our society is radically different in many ways from that which existed a few short years ago. We believe that the world in which we live is God’s creation and that the Spirit of God is continually at work in this world. Our vocation is to recognize and respond to the action of God in His world today.

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A new curriculum in the church can be a significant means of assisting church people to recognize and respond to the action of God in His world. It will challenge parishes to re-examine the objectives and purposes of their educational work. Such a re-examination will indicate where strengths and weaknesses lie and can lead to the development of a stronger educational programme in the parish. Scope. The new curriculum will affect all ages of the membership of the parish and will provide the written resources for a parish education program in its children, youth and adult areas. Context. Education for participation in the church’s life and mission takes place within the context of the worship of the church. Planners of the new curriculum intend to take this point seriously. It will be reflected in the curriculum materials in various ways and will be expressed in the general recommendations which the department will make concerning the parish education programme. Purpose. The educational programme will help persons to see, explore and understand the relevance of the Gospel in their own lives and in the lives of others. Pivot Points. Both persons and Gospel will be focal points for the new curriculum. Organizational Centre. The new curriculum will therefore focus on the action which brings together the Gospel and the person in a way which has true meaning for the learner, and thus is “education.” Basic Assumptions. 1. We believe that the Gospel, the good news of what God has done and is doing in His world—the news of the fact of creation and incarnation of Christ, the redemption of man and the fellowship of the Spirit in the church—has relevance to persons of every age. Christian education helps discover that relevance. 2. The new curriculum, therefore, must be based on a comprehensive and adequate theology. 3. Because persons can see the relevance of the Gospel in different ways at different stages of their lives, attention must be given to the varying situations of persons as they develop, and the Gospel expressed in such ways for them that they can discover and rediscover this relevance all through life. 4. True learning takes place most effectively when teaching begins “where people are.” In other words, the curriculum must effectively employ the interests, concerns and needs of learners as points of departure. 5. Since parish worship is the setting around which learning takes place, the teaching-learning process can frequently concern itself with the changing emphases of the Church Year. Source: General Synod Journal (1962): 157–58.

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Document 39

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Address from some women of Ottawa to the Board of the DFMS, Ecclesiastical Province of Canada (1885) (Complete) My Lord, Reverend Fathers in Christ, and Members of the Domestic and Foreign Board of Missions: We come before you as a small deputation of Churchwomen of Ottawa, to ask your consideration of Women’s work, in connection with your Board. There are in the Church to-day Marys who have chosen the better part; there are the restless serving Marthas, who only want the opportunity to do something for Jesus; the Magdalens, who tell the story of our blessed Lord’s resurrection; the Phoebes, who convey messages of love and Christian greeting; the Tryphenas, and Tryphosas, Dorcases, who are never weary in well doing; Priscillas, who are occupied in showing the way of the Lord more perfectly; yes, in the Church of Canada—from Victoria to Sydney—there are women longing to labor more abundantly, to consecrate all their talents to the Lord’s work. And, knowing this, we ask that as the Apostles of old recognized the women of their day, as labourers with them, you, our beloved Fathers in Christ, may recognize the women of the Church of Canada, and give your hearty and earnest consent that there should be established, in connection with your Board, a Woman’s Auxiliary. That you will consider before separating the best and most practical method of work, in every way facilitating the formation of Branch Auxiliaries in the different Dioceses and Parishes. We are assured that the women of the Church of England are prepared to accept whatever plan your Board may consider the wisest, for the promotion of Missionary effort, and the advancement of our Master’s Kingdom. We are very faithfully, and in the love of Christ, Your co-workers, Fanny M. Forrest, Harriet Muckleston, Annie M. Pollard, Geraldine Stewart, Jessie Bell, Annie Matheson, Roberta E. Tilton. The Chairman, The Bishop of Ontario (Bishop Lewis) replied to this address on behalf of the Board most sympathetically and after the deputation had withdrawn the following resolution was passed:— Moved by Archdeacon Bedford-Jones, (Kingston) Seconded by the Bishop of Algoma, (Bishop Sullivan): That the Board has received with unfeigned gratitude to God, the deputation of ladies, initiating the formation of a Woman’s Auxiliary Association. Most heartily the Board wishes this important movement Godspeed, and will wel-

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document 40 come the cooperation of all our Christian Sisters in the Church of this Ecclesiastical Province in carrying out the noble object of our Missionary Society; and That the following be a sub-Committee to confer with the ladies who have addressed the Board, and to take such preliminary steps as may be deemed advisable for the promotion of the object in view:— The Lord Bishops of Ontario, (Lewis) and Toronto, (Sweatman), Rev. J. D. Cayley, Hon. Thomas White, (Ottawa) and the Mover. Source: Mrs. Willoughby Cummings, Our Story (N.p., N.d.), 9–12.

Document 40

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W.A., “The Aim and Plan” (1911) (Complete) Aim.—Adopted by the Woman’s Auxiliary, Triennial Meeting, 1911: The Aim is—For Canada: To consider impartially the field as a whole; to place our help where most needed, viewed from this standpoint to grade it according to relative needs; and to reconsider it year by year. For the Foreign Field: To undertake all the work among women and children in the Canadian fields and the support of all women workers, thus working hand in hand with M.S.C.C. and relieving them of this work. The Plan.—Plan adopted by the Board of Management, M.S.C.C. and the General Board, W.A., for the putting into effect of the Aim for the Foreign Field adopted by the W.A. by resolution of the Triennial meeting. It is agreed: I. That the W.A. be, and hereby is, recognized as being responsible for the “work among women and children” in the Foreign Fields of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada. II. That the term “Work among women and children” be understood as including: 1. The support of all women Missionaries exclusive of the wives of Missionaries and the support of all female native agents, whether engaged in evangelistic, educational, or medical work. 2. The itineration expenses of all such women Missionaries, and of all female native agents, in the field. 3. The support of children in orphanages. N.B.—“The W.A. may accept designated funds for the support of or education of boys up to ten years of age, such funds should be included in the estimates under, ‘Work among women and children.’” 4. The provision of furniture and equipment for: (a) All Day Schools for girls. (b) All Boarding Schools, or places of higher education for girls.

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document 40 (c) All institutions for the training or housing of of female native

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agents. (d) Women’s and children’s wards in Hospitals. (e) Kindergartens for both sexes. 5. The provision, for all schools or institutions mentioned under 4 (b) and (c), of all household expenses, including servants. 6. “The foregoing subsections, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, shall not exclude the acceptance by the W.A. of special appeals for such other objects (including the building of Churches), for work among women and children as may be approved by the Consultative Committee.” III. That a “Consultative Committee” be constituted, consisting of a number not exceeding eight of the General Officers of the W.A., and an equal number of the Executive Committee of the M.S.C.C. This Committee shall consider questions and estimates connected with “the work among women and children” and shall make recommendations thereon to the Executive Committee of the M.S.C.C. and to the Executive Committee of the W.A. This Committee may also consider and make recommendations concerning such other questions as may be referred to it by the Executive Committee of the W.A. or of the M.S.C.C. The chairman of the Executive Committee of the M.S.C.C. shall be chairman of the Consultative Committee. The quorum of the Consultative Committee shall consist of not less than two from the M.S.C.C. and two from the W.A. IV. That the authorities of each Missionary Diocese or District, shall clearly specify in the annual estimate forms, the amount required for the “work among women and children”; and that the estimates thus prepared, for each Diocese or District shall be sent to the Organizing Secretary of the M.S.C.C., who shall, after approval of the same by the Consultative Committee (Clause III.) prepare an itemized statement showing the total amount required for the “work among women and children,” and forward the same to the Corresponding Secretary of the W.A., and submit a copy to the Executive Committee of M.S.C.C. V. That designated funds for the “work among women and children,” including stipends of women Missionaries, contributed to the M.S.C.C., shall be forwarded to the Field through the General Treasurer of the W.A. VI. That the W.A. shall assume for the year 1913 the provision of a proportion to be agreed upon between the Executive Committee of the M.S.C.C. and of the W.A of the total estimate for the “work among women and children” as prepared by the Organizing Secretary of the M.S.C.C. under Clause IV. VII. That the M.S.C.C. shall pay if necessary through the General Treasurer of the W.A., as a “grant in aid, to the work among women and children,” a sum equivalent to the difference between the total of the amount available under clauses V. and VI. and the gross amount mentioned in the total estimate for the “work among women and children.” (Clause IV.)

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document 41 VIII. That the W.A. shall make every effort to increase annually, the sum contributed under Clause VI. until the same shall equal the gross amount (less designated funds, Clause V.) mentioned in the total estimate for “work among women and children” (Clause IV.) and that the “grant in aid” received by the W.A. from the M.S.C.C., under the terms of Clause VII. shall then cease. N.B.—It is understood that the last part of this Clause shall not prevent the principle of the grant-in-aid coming into force at any time when the development of the work among women and children may render it necessary. IX. That the General Board of the W.A. shall not undertake new work, or any extension of existing work, “among women and children,” except under the terms of this agreement. X. That the Corresponding Secretary of the W.A. in consultation with the Organizing Secretary of the M.S.C.C. shall arrange all deputation engagements for women Missionaries. XI. That in all official lists of Foreign Missionaries, no distinguishing mark, such as W.A., shall be placed against any of the names; and that all such lists shall be followed by the note “The Woman’s Auxiliary to the M.S.C.C. is responsible for all work among women and children in the Foreign Mission Fields of the Church of England in Canada.” Sources: Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada Report, appendix to General Synod Journal (1915): 6–9; Mrs. Willoughby Cummings, Our Story (N.p., N.d.), 77–82.

Document 41

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Excerpts from the Rule of the S.S.J.D. (1885) The object of a Community is first, Personal Sanctification; second, Active Charity. The Life of Prayer and Devotion must come first, or the Community will soon sink down into a society of persons living together for the work they can do, instead of a Society gathered together in the Church to live in loving devotion to Almighty God, irrespective of the work each member may accomplish. From this side of the Sister’s life she draws her courage, and her inspiration for her Active Works of Charity: teaching, nursing, ministering to the fallen, the aged, and the poor. But these works, admirable as they are, rank second in importance; for she who does them does them because she is a Sister. These very things are being done every day by devoted women who are not called to a Sister’s life; to do them does not constitute a Sister. The distinctive feature in a Sister is this, that she has chosen a State of Life. Of course, a Life of Discipline, such as this, separates those who live it very much from others. There must be a concentration of all the powers for the work in hand. A gravity and seriousness ought to mark your life, and a quietness of deportment; but also true joy, peace, and brightness; and these shine forth in the countenance. Remember, “true joy in a Religious does not show itself in loud unrestrained laughter, nor in silly jesting and chatter to every one she meets.”

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document 42 Fun and wit are not forbidden but it must be restrained and marked with refinement. Sisters must work hard. They are called to be poor, but not idle. If in charge of school work, who does not appreciate the fact that one free from worldly distractions and cares and having no outside interests nor social duties can be amongst the children and by gentle influence and example and surroundings of the religious atmosphere, win many souls for Christ and train them that they may be able to take their places as good Church members in the future? In the hospital Sisters learn to care for the sick and suffering in an intelligent ministry that is to be given purely for the love of God and of souls, so that they who experience their nursing may feel the difference between it and paid service. Here, too, Mission work of a very real kind may be done. In the care of the aged another kind of work may be done. Perhaps there is nothing which so exercises the patience, and which is so needed in these days; places where men and women in their declining years may, in quiet religious surroundings, prepare for the summons for the life beyond the veil. [The anonymous author, after quoting the above, adds: It was impressed upon us then, as now, that everything—sweeping, dusting, cooking, Church embrodiery, the washing and ironing of the linen for the use of the Church—everything must be done thoroughly, punctually, and quietly, without appearance of haste or excitement, no matter what the pressure. We must not despise any work as menial, but realize that the work of the hands is as acceptable to God as the work of the intellect.] Source: [Anon.], A Memoir of the Life and Work of Hannah Grier Coome (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 127–28.

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Document 42 Canon on Deaconesses (1921) (Complete)

canon xvii. on deaconesses Whereas, the office of the Deaconess is primarily a ministry of succour, bodily and spiritual, especially to women. And whereas, the time has come when this office should be canonically recognized by the Church of England in Canada; therefore, this Synod enacts as follows: 1. Women of devout character and approved fitness, unmarried or widowed, may be set apart by the Bishop of any Diocese for the work of a Deaconess, according to such forms as shall be authorized by the House of Bishops, and no woman shall be recognized as a Deaconess until she has been so set apart; provided always that a Deaconess duly set apart in another branch of our Com-

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munion may be recognized and licensed by any Bishop in Canada. Such position shall be vacated by marriage. 2 The duty of a Deaconess is under the direction of the Incumbent to assist in the care of the poor and the sick, in ministering to women, girls and children, and in the work of religious education, moral reform, and other kinds of social service. 3. No woman shall be set apart for the work of a Deaconess until she be twenty-five years of age, unless the Bishop for special reasons shall deem it expedient to admit candidates at an earlier age; the age of admittance in no case to be less than twenty-three years; it being further provided that no woman shall be set apart until she have laid before the Bishop testimonials certifying: (a) That she is a Communicant in good standing in the Church; (b) That she possesses such characteristics as, in the judgment of the persons testifying, fit her for some of the branches of duty above defined; such testimonials shall be signed by two Priests of the Church and by five lay communicants, of whom two shall be men and three women. The Bishop shall also satisfy himself, by examination or otherwise that the applicant has an adequate preparation for her work, both technical and religious, which preparation shall cover a period of at least two years. 4. No Deaconess shall accept work in a Diocese without the written authority or license of the Bishop of that Diocese; nor shall she undertake parish work except at the request of the Rector of the parish. 5. When not working in connection with a parish, the Deaconess shall be under the direct oversight of the Bishop of the Diocese in which she is canonically resident. The transfer of a Deaconess from one Diocese to another shall be by letter from the Bishop. 6. A Deaconess may at any time resign her office to the ecclesiastical authority of the Diocese in which she is a canonical resident, but she shall not be suspended or removed from office except by the Bishop, for cause. Source: General Synod Journal (1921): 577–78.

Document 43 Excerpt from Emily Murphy, Janey Canuck in the West (1910) Once, as a child, I heard an old pioneer tell about the wolf-demons and how they cried at night around his house, and I shivered with terror. It seemed an experience so dreadful as to be almost unthinkable. Now, in the reality, I was not in the least uneasy. Perhaps it was because an awful weariness had settled down on me. I had spent nine hours in the open sleigh with the temperature 50° below zero. The tension of the air had made a large draught on my vitality, and I felt I must sleep.

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document 43 “This is our log-road, and these are all your own trees—miles of them. Look up, sweetheart!” I opened the corner of one eye long enough to see we had entered a forest of towering, spear-headed spruces, but although I have come half across the continent to view these very trees, I cannot bear to look at them. Why does the Padre shake me like that? He is hateful. And now my teeth are chattering like—I am too sleepy to think of the word, but it is the name of something the corner-man clatters in the minstrel show. I try to drink some brandy-wine the Padre gives me, but my lips freeze on the metal of the flask. “Castanets!” Yes, that is the word I want! Only a few twists more in the road till I hear voices, and, quicker than I can tell it, two lumber-jacks have me out of the sleigh and into a wide, low cabin that is bright and warm, where there is an odour of fresh, wheaten bread, and where a man moves among pots and pans with the air of one conducting a religious ceremony. . . . We had service in the camp this morning. It opened with the singing of “Jerusalem the Golden.” The Padre led off and sang the hymn all in one key and that a wrong one, but it was a well-meant effort, and we all joined in with a will. The lesson was from Job xxviii. The Padre stopped reading after the sixth verse, and told us about the great pathfinders in these Canadian woods and what they accomplished—about Pierre Radisson, Groseillers, Mackenzie, Hudson, and Macdonald of Garth. The men were deeply interested, because this winter they have helped to cut out wilderness roads themselves. Then the Padre read and commented on the seventh and eighth verses— “There is a path which no fowl knoweth and which the vulture’s eye hath not seen; the lion’s whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it.” We had another hymn and then the sermon. It was not a sermon either— more of a talk about the mother-heart of God. He compared the comfort of God to that of a mother. A mother has (1) a simple method of instruction. She has (2) a special capacity for attending to hurt hearts. (3) An almost unlimited patience for the erring. (4) A peculiar favouritism for the weaklings. (5) An unique way of putting her child to sleep. The Padre has not preached for months. He is resting his throat. Perhaps this is why the subject took such a hold of him. Or perhaps it was because he had a vision of a far-away mother, and a soft sorrow crept across his heart. It is so easy to tear a paper along the line in which it is folded. Be that as it may, some way or other this little company of men seemed to move him strangely, and he, in turn, moved them to tears. Source: Emily Murphy, Janey Canuck in the West (repr. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975).

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documents 44 and 45

Document 44 Prolocutor’s ruling on the admission of women to General Synod (1924) (Complete) The language of the Constitution rendering it necessary to determine whether male or female person, or both, are intended: 1. It is certain that only men were in contemplation when the law was made: 2. It is equally certain that women would not have been included had the point arisen: 3. It is a principle of legal interpretation that in questions of doubtful terminology, regard should be had to the intention of those making the law: The Chair therefore rules that until the General Synod positively enacts otherwise women are not entitled to membership in the Lower House. Source: General Synod Journal (1924): 56.

Document 45

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Excerpt from Anglican National Commission Report (1931) Throughout the whole country women are exercising a ministry, the value of which cannot be reckoned in the work of the Church generally and especially in all spheres of missionary activity. In our Indian Boarding Schools, and Missions, are to be found a devoted band of women who, in lonely places, and amid conditions in which they are often deprived of the ordinary conveniences of life carry out their ministry of education, evangelism and succour. Wherever we have gone we have found these women of our Church. . . . In the Woman’s Auxiliary the Church possesses an organization which, in the devotion of its service and success of its work, stands unexcelled in the whole Anglican Communion. The Dominion Board of the W.A. is facing the question as to whether or not they should widen their scope of work and offer themselves as an Auxiliary to the whole work of the Church. This is an indication of movements running deep through the sphere of women’s work and women’s status in the Church. Are there places within the Church’s organizations for more women of business capacity, leadership and executive ability? These questions are most insistent. How long will women continue to work for the Church, if denied a voice and place in those bodies which direct the policy of the Church? The very lack of agitation would seem to mean that many have despaired of any satisfactory change and are devoting their abilities and strength to other organizations in the community. We feel most strongly that the position accorded to the Dominion Board of the W.A. on the Board of Missions and on the Board of Management of M.S.C.C. should be continued to them under the scheme of reorganization of these bodies.

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document 46 It must be stated that the problem of a supply of workers and leaders in the various organizations for women in the Church is becoming acute. The multiplicity of women’s activities of all kinds in the community has created a great demand for women who possess the qualities of leadership. We find that the younger women are not coming forward in sufficient numbers to take their place as leaders in our Church activities. The problem of leadership in this realm is real. . . . Source: Anglican National Commission Report, appendix to General Synod Journal (1931): 109–11.

Document 46

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Excerpts from General Synod, Committee on Women’s Work, “The Future Pattern of Women’s Work in the Church” (1955) In the course of our deliberations and inquiries, we have been aware that there is a good deal of heart-searching going on both among those who have responsibility in the women’s organizations and among those who feel a concern for women who are not attached to any organization. We received expressions of opinion from the Executive Committee of the Dominion Board of the Woman’s Auxiliary and the Church Year Federation besides answers to a letter published in “The Living Message.” We had before us Dr. Charlotte Whitton’s Report which deals particularly with professional women who seldom find a place in organizations; and a member of our committee visited a business women’s group. We find two trends of thought emerging;— i) Towards unification of organizations. ii) Towards freedom of activity to meet the needs of different types of women. These two are not entirely incompatible; but the emphasis is different.

unification. The Woman’s Auxiliary is the official women’s organization of the Church and spreads from Coast to Coast. There are also branches of the Mothers’ Union in various parts of the country. The Women’s Church Year is strong and flourishing in a few places. All these are actually or potentially Dominion-wide; and there is a risk, as the responsible leaders well know, of distressing local rivalries. We are thankful to record a good deal of excellent co-ordination and co-operation. One W.A. member expresses the ideal to be aimed at as;—“A modern overall Woman’s Organization in parishes to bring about a unification of missionary and other groups, preserving a member’s sense of belonging to a body with a common life and a common purpose. There should be groups for different ages to study, serve, and have Christian fellowship.”

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freedom and diversity. Groups of business and professional women are beginning to appear among those whose training and occupation give them an outlook and interests rather different from the majority in the existing organizations. The Women’s Church Year aims particularly at flexibility. It has short terms for its officers to develop the maximum of leadership among its members. It has a distinctive feature in its insistence on direct giving; so that none of its activities are fund-raising, and all the more energy can be devoted to practical service, while preserving also a proper place for prayer and study. . . .

Recommendations Deaconesses Status. We feel that the status of Deaconesses should be made much clearer and that it should be understood that the Order of Deaconesses is a distinct Order in the Anglican Communion. a) The name Deaconess should only be used for a woman who has been made a Deaconess by a Bishop, with laying on of hands. b) The Canon which enjoins the licensing of Deaconesses should not be allowed to become dead letter. C) A Deaconess on the staff of a Diocese or parish should have the status of a member of that staff, with full membership of the Synod; and she should be summoned to Deanery or other conferences. Training. We beg to endorse the recommendations of our parent committee on the subject of training.

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The Nature of the Order of Deaconesses. We feel it is most unfortunate that there is a divergence in the Anglican Communion concerning the nature of the Order of Deaconesses. In the Church of England, Deaconesses are ordained for life; but the Anglican Church of Canada has followed the American pattern of a conditional setting apart to be terminated by marriage. . . . We would draw attention to the recent statement issued by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (November 1954). This includes a quotation from the English Canons, as they stand after recent revision;— “The order of Deaconesses is the one order of ministry in the Church of England,to which women are admitted by prayer and the laying on of hands of the Bishop.”

This order is expressly differentiated from the diaconate of men and entry on the threefold ministry. Their Graces continue;—

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document 46 “At her ordination as a Deaconess, a woman receives by episcopal ordination a distinctive and permanent status in the Church, and is dedicated to a lifelong service and ministry. The Church thus gives to her ministry authorization and authority by the laying on of hands. No vow or implied promise of celibacy is involved.”

(What does seem to be implied is that marriage should no more be a bar theologically for a woman than for a man conscious of a vocation to serve the Church. The question is a practical and personal one, largely affected by the social patterns of a rapidly changing world. The woman who is “dedicated to a lifelong service and ministry” in the Church will have that dedication first in mind in any consideration of marriage. We can picture conditions in Canada, particularly in missionary districts, where a married Deaconess might be able to carry on a very real and valuable ministry). . . . Church Workers in General.

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qualifications. Qualifications for Church work vary very much. We would recommend that an effort should be made to issue workers with appropriate certificates which would provide some classification, showing the standard of both practical and intellectual training. There is still a place for the amateur; but it is an increasingly small one. We are extremely grateful to some who are giving loyal and fruitful service in this way. On the whole we must recognize that professionalism has come to stay, and that it can be and is being consecrated to the service of God. To be recognized as a professional Church worker, a woman should be able to produce solid evidence of training for the work she wishes to undertake. co-ordination. We consider that women working for the Church are much in need of facilities for;— a) Mutual consultation, fellowship and support. b) Registering qualifications, receiving notice of posts and finding the right positions. . . . Recruiting. . . . Status, classification, recognition, are all important. A woman of ability needs assurance that she will be used according to that ability, and she needs reasonable security of tenure. There have been occasions when a Bishop asked for a qualified woman who was not forthcoming. This situation is part of a vicious circle. If there is not status, recognition, security, women will hesitate to train to bring high qualifications into a doubtful field; and responsible people will hesitate to urge them to do so. . . . We offer these findings out of a profound concern first for our Church and then for the women in the Church. A great deal is being said in these days about

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document 47 the unity and wholeness of the Church. This demands a wholeness in the service men and women give to the Church. It is unfortunate in some ways that we have had to frame this report as a report on “Women’s Work.” There is a danger, noted by some groups reporting to Geneva for Dr. Bliss’s survey, that “An organization, group or fellowship tends to become ‘The Church’ for the woman who finds there Christian fellowship, worship, and the upbuilding of her faith. Thus there can arise in practice, although the theory of it is denied, a Church within a Church.” We believe the word to link Future—Women—Church—is something like this:—Let the Church recognize in practice as well as in theory that Church women are responsible Church members, persons created to serve God with the varying talents He has given them. Then the pattern will work out, and that to the obliteration of any false distinction between “The Church” and “Women in the Church.” Source: General Synod Journal (1955): 391–401.

Document 47

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Anglican Professors in Theological Education, Statement (1975) (Complete) As Anglicans involved in theological education, we wish to affirm publicly our support for the ordination of women to the priesthood. We affirm further that, in our opinion, the time is ripe for local action on this principle in the Anglican Church of Canada. More women than at any other time in our church’s history are applying for admission to theological college and many of these, in their applications, state clearly their own conviction that they are called to the priesthood. We believe that our church is now in a position to welcome and test these vocations with the same care and generous spirit generally accorded to the vocations of others. In the classic story of Genesis, it is humanity that God creates in his own image, both male and female. This affirmation is echoed in St. John’s account of the new creation, in which Christ, the restorer of the divine image, becomes flesh. It is his humanity, not his maleness, which is thus offered to the world for its light and its imitation. These cornerstones of Christian theology provide, in our view, a sufficient theological basis for the action we recommend. We recognize the practical need to continue the work of interpreting the meaning of this step to any who find it difficult to accept and we accept our share of the whole church’s responsibility for this task. We recognize also the wisdom of General Synod 1973 in linking this need for interpretation with its first acceptance of the principle. We are now convinced that in some areas the church has prepared itself, and is ready to take action.

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document 47 We therefore express our hope that the forthcoming General Synod, by a second affirmative vote, will open the way for action, as well as our hope that the House of Bishops will make it possible for any diocesan bishop who is prepared to proceed to do so. The experience of those parts of the church which adopt this course will, we believe, be of value to the whole church. As the Lambeth Conference of 1968 said on this subject, “The New Testament does not encourage Christians to think that nothing should be done for the first time” (Resolutions and Reports, 106). The Anglican communion already has women in the priesthood; and the Anglican Church of Canada, through its participation in the work of the Anglican Consultative Council, has kept in continuous touch with its sister churches as the movement leading to the ordination of women has gone forward. Beyond the Anglican communion, we note the increasing acceptance in the United Church of Canada of the women within its ministry; and we welcome with gratitude the recent statement of over 100 Roman Catholic theologians (many of them Canadians) expressing their “concurrence in principle with the acceptance of the ordination of women to the priesthood of the universal church” (The Ecumenist 13.1, Nov.–Dec. 1974, 15). The fundamental equality of men and women is now widely accepted in Canadian society. Within the church, that equality has always been implicit in baptism. In this country, therefore, it is appropriate to ask that our church take action now to recognize this created equality also in ordination. We believe this action will lead to a fuller disclosure of the divine image for the people of our time, the divine image restored in Christ and created by God both male and female. [The statement was signed by professors at the Atlantic School of Theology, the Faculty of Theology at McGill University, Montreal Diocesan College, Bishop’s University, Trinity College, Wycliffe College, Centre for Christian Studies, Ecumenical Institute of Canada, Huron College, St. John’s College, College of Emmanuel and St.Chad, Vancouver School of Theology, and General Synod.] Source: Canadian Churchman 101 (May 1975): 1.

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Document 48 Excerpts from Joanne Dewart, “Address to General Synod” (1975)

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Christianity and Feminism Self-transcendence, the sharing in the divine life, is offered only to human persons and to all human persons, but human life can and does exist in conditions that make a positive response to the divine call terribly difficult, almost impossible. Throughout history men and women have fought to conquer these conditions of squalor, sickness and oppression. It is to the discredit of Christians— to our discredit—that we have not often enough been in the front line of these battles, and that all too frequently the Christian church has lent itself to a shoring up of discriminatory attitudes and institutions of all kinds—slavery, the exploitation of agricultural and industrial workers, the stifling of intellectual life. It has often been a question of societal sin rather than personal, although the two are intertwined. We can be so blinded by the culture we live in and by its myths that we become morally desensitized. Such societal moral callousness has generally marked the attitude to and the treatment of women in the Christian church. (It is true of other societies to an even greater degree, but today we are looking at ourselves.) Women have been oppressed; they have not been afforded the same opportunities to grow to full human personhood, to respond to the divine call in an adult way, as have men. But the oppression and injury are not all on one side: men, in carrying out this oppression, injure themselves, and women as they acquiesce in the discrimination, share the responsibility for the injuries done to themselves and to men. Sexual discrimination has harmed Christians of both sexes and so the Christian Church. We can begin to appreciate the harm done to Christian men and women if we compare our sexual stereotypes with the challenge and demands of the Gospel. There we are asked to transcend ourselves in service to others, to go beyond our own comfort and our own interest, beyond those things that are familiar and safe in order to give a free, personal response through Christ to the Father in the Spirit. Such a response calls for courage and humility, intelligence and patience, justice and compassion on the part of all Christians, women and men. But have we not, in fact, divided and assigned virtues on the basis of sex? The Christian man should be brave, intelligent and just; the Christian woman humble, patient and compassionate. In brief, in incorporating into Christianity the social myths of innate sexual characteristics, we have fostered one-sided development—in fact, distortion—and both sexes have been inhibited from developing that fullness and integrity of personhood called for by the gospel. (Let us note in passing that it has been more commonly accepted that men can encompass the virtues of both sexes than can women; a compassionate man is not considered as much an anomaly as an enterprising woman.) . . . Source: duplicated typescript.

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document 49

Document 49 Excerpt from “Manifesto of Concerned Clergy” (1975) (Complete)

manifesto on the ordination of women to the priesthood from concerned clergy of the anglican church of canada

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1. This Manifesto springs out of a deep love for the Anglican tradition within Christendom, and a deep loyalty to it. It has been signed by members of the clergy who are unhappy about recent trends in our Church, and especially the decision of General Synod with regard to the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood. In signing the Manifesto, we believe we are not only making clear our own position, but are also bearing witness to the truest principles of Anglicanism. Herewith, in charity, let us explain the stand to which our consciences compel us. 2. The historic position of Anglicanism is that it is a Church founded upon the Creeds, Scriptures, Sacraments and Orders of the classical catholic and orthodox tradition. For members of the Anglican Church of Canada, these basic truths are formally enshrined in the document promulgated by the first General Synod of our Church, the Solemn Declaration of 1893, which continues to appear on page viii of the Canadian Book of Common Prayer. Therein we describe ourselves as, “an integral portion of the One Body of Christ composed of Churches which, united under the One Divine Head and in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, hold the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds as maintained by the undivided primitive Charch in the undisputed ecumenical Councils; receive the same Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as containing all things necessary to salvation; teach the same Word of God; partake of the same Divinely ordained Sacraments, through the ministry of the same Apostolic Orders; . . .”

3. It is therefore with alarm that we witness our Church apparently abandoning this heritage, by its unilateral decision on the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood. A form of such Ordination has, of course, already been undertaken in Hong Kong and in the United States of America. But both of these instances could, perhaps, be overlooked. In our sister Church of Sweden, the Ordination of Women to the priesthood was forced upon the Church by the secular government in 1961 (and has continued to be a cause of division within the Swedish Church ever since). The situation of our own Church is different, yet not entirely so. We do seem to have been unduly influenced, in recent times, by essentially secular movements—and

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document 49 it is notoriously difficult, at the best of times, to determine when a secular trend is merely a passing fad, and when it is a manifestation of God’s will in the world. Even the Body of Christ must be careful in laying claim to know the mind of her Lord. Successive General Synods have encouraged a particular plan of union as God’s will for the merger of Churches in Canada, and then drew back in 1975; this does not instill any confidence that it has successfully identified the will of God with regard to the priesting of women. Yet a decision has been made, and it remains only for the House of Bishops to act. 4. There are many of us who reject the validity of that decision ab initio who feel that it is an impossibility, in the divine economy, for a woman to be a priest. Holy Scripture testifies to the dignity of women in many different ministries, reaching their consummation in the vocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; but those ministries have never been seen to include the ordained ministerial priesthood in the household of God. There are others of us who feel that the Holy Spirit may indeed be calling the Church at large to re-examine the whole question of Ministry, including the question of women within the Ministry. However, it is our firm belief that it is not within the competence of the Anglican Communion, let alone any one of its provinces or dioceses, to effect such a change unilaterally in a Ministry which we share with other members of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. True ecumenism, and our mutual responsibility and interdependence within the Body of Christ, demand that we act only in consensus with our sister Churches. To speak of the possibility of such consensus would have been foolishness less than a generation ago. Yet while the whole ecumenical climate has now changed, we are preparing to act unilaterally, without awaiting even the decision of other autonomous members of the Anglican family or the advice of the Lambeth Conference, let alone the counsel of other Catholic Churches. How will we now be able to lay claim to that which has always been a hallmark of Catholic Faith and Order: a universally recognized ministry? 5. It is clear that many of the faithful clergy and laity of the Anglican Church of Canada now face a crisis of conscience. It might appear that the best way to resolve this would be to leave the fellowship of our Church and to find a spiritual home elsewhere. This, however, would not be an easy road for us to walk. We have been born, or have chosen to become, Christians of the Anglican tradition, and that is what we desire to remain. In addition, since most of us occupy positions of pastoral responsibility, in dioceses or parishes, we have a duty to the people we serve. For most of them, it would be bewildering to be led into the communion of some other Church. And, given the isolated position of many of our congregations in this vast country, it would be most difficult to hold the faithful together in any viable and visible fellowship. Furthermore, in the Anglican tradition of a married clergy, many of our number have family responsibilities. For anyone trained for a parish ministry,

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document 49 and with no other profession immediately open to him, it becomes necessary to weigh carefully the various demands of Creed, of conscience, and of practical necessity. Finally, loving our Church as we do, we are concerned not only with our own integrity, but also with the wholeness of the Anglican Church. Now, more than ever, Anglicanism needs our witness. Our problem is, how best to bear our witness without appearing to acquiesce in a decision which we believe to be mistaken? 6. If, therefore, we elect to remain where we are, it is only after much thought and prayer for the welfare of our own consciences, of our families, of our people, of the Anglican Communion, and of the whole Church Catholic. To make such a decision may seem anomalous, for it can only be made on the basis of our dissociation from the assent given by General Synod to the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood. We must protest such ordinations, and we will not be able to accept the ministrations of women so ordained as priestly. Remaining in the communion of Anglicanism under these circumstances is possible for us because the Canadian General Synod, in wisdom and charity, also passed a motion to respect the conscience of dissenters and to protect us from canonical disabilities as a result of our stand. We are happy to take advantage of this gesture, in the hope and trust that the full implications of such a conscience clause will be respected and realized. Anomalous though our position will be, it appears the least divisive of several unhappy alternatives. We pray it will prove to be viable. 7. It has been one of our great fears that such a breach of orthodox Faith and Order would sever completely the fraternal relationships which for many years we have enjoyed with other branches of the Church Catholic, especially during this recent time of growing ecumenical goodwill. With many we are in full Communion. With others we are in official theological conversations: to our shame, we must admit that some of these conversations are on the very topic of priestly ministry on which we have now acted so rashly. It is our earnest prayer, that this fellowship can be maintained despite what has happened. May our own concern for the integrity of orthodox Faith and Order represent a saving remnant of Israel to ensure that Anglicanism in Canada has not entirely and forever lost her way. [The names of 209 clergy follow, including Bishops G. R. Calvert, J. D. Creeggan, and Hugh V. Stiff, fourteen archdeacons, and two deans.] Source: Canadian Churchman 101 (Oct. 1975): 9.

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document 50

Document 50 Human Sexuality: A Statement by the Anglican Bishops of Canada (1997) (Complete)

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The Background In 1976 the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada sought advice as it faced the issue of homosexuality in contemporary society and how the church ought to relate pastorally, and in terms of ordination. A task force presented a lengthy report to the bishops. By 1979 the bishops had committed themselves to further study and they requested the preparation of study materials to help further discussion at all levels of the church. These materials were published in 1985. In 1979, as an interim measure, the bishops issued a statement based on the following belief: We believe as Christians, that homosexual persons, as children of God, have a full and equal claim with all other persons, upon the love, acceptance, concern and pastoral care of the Church. As well, the Bishops issued a four point pastoral guideline for themselves as they considered the admission of individual persons to the church’s ordained ministry. Our present and future considerations about homosexuality should be pursued within the larger study of human sexuality in its totality; We accept all persons, regardless of sexual orientation, as equal before God; our acceptance of persons with homosexual orientation is not an acceptance of homosexual activity; We do not accept the blessing of homosexual unions; We will not call into question the ordination of a person who has shared with the bishop his/her homosexual orientation if there has been a commitment to the Bishop to abstain from sexual acts with persons of the same sex as part of the requirement for ordination. In referring to this guideline in the press, Archbishop Scott, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada at that time said, “Our statement is not meant to be, in any way, legislation or a final doctrinal statement. It is a pastoral statement and we intend it to assist us in the exercise of our pastoral ministry within the Church.” The house held a number of study sessions on the topic of human sexuality through the 1980’s. In 1991 a new task force was constituted by the Primate. At the General Synod of 1992 a major block of time was devoted to an open forum on the topic. More materials were made available for study and by 1994/ 1995 approximately 170 groups and 2500 people had used the study guide “Hearing Diverse Voices, Seeking Common Ground.” At the 1995 General Synod, an important report was presented, following a hearing, which lead to a motion being presented and strongly supported which:

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Affirmed the presence and contributions of gay men and lesbians in the life of the church and condemned bigotry, violence and hatred directed toward any due to their sexual orientation. This report recommended among other things, that the process of dialogue continue; that all of us should “learn and reflect more about our sexuality as a whole,” and that the dialogue should be extended so that the “whole church family has an opportunity to be involved.” The Faith Worship and Ministry Committee of the ACC was given a mandate to provide leadership to the church to ensure a continuation of the dialogue. All of this effort has fostered a greater understanding of what it is to be a gay man or lesbian in the church and a heightened sense of pastoral concern on the part of the church. Also, as gay men and lesbians have found greater acceptance in the church, they have been enabled to share their experiences in a more public way to the benefit of the whole church which has become increasingly aware of the breadth and depth of their contribution. At its April 1997 meeting, discussing this topic for the first time in open session, the House of Bishops continued its deliberations and requested the task force to redraft the 1979 guideline in the light of new pastoral awareness while at the same time retaining the original intent of the guideline. In undertaking this task we seek to articulate how far we have come, as well as to acknowledge those areas where continued study and dialogue is necessary. Theological reflection and pastoral action in the Church since 1979 have focused on four key areas, and it is these that shape our considerations in this statement. The church has reflected on the place of gay and lesbian persons in society; the place of gay and lesbian persons in the church; the significance of committed sexually active relationships between people of the same sex and the significance of such relationships for ordination of gay and lesbian persons. Gay and lesbian persons in society As Christians we believe that homosexual persons are created in the image and likeness of God and have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, concern and care of the church. As an expression of this love and care, the gospel of Jesus Christ compels Christians to oppose all forms of human injustice and to affirm that all persons are brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. It is on the basis of these theological insights, which remain pertinent irrespective of any considerations of the appropriateness or otherwise of homosexual acts, that the Anglican Church of Canada has affirmed that gay and lesbian persons are entitled to equal protection under the law with all other Canadian citizens. Thus, this House supported the passage of bill C-33 that made sexual orientation a prohibited ground for discrimination under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We call upon the church and all its members to

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document 50 continue to work to safeguard the freedom, dignity and responsibility of every person and to seek an end to discrimination. Gay and lesbian persons in the Church

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We are thankful to see a new sensitivity emerging towards gay and lesbian persons in the Church. No longer can we talk in the abstract. We are experiencing a growing awareness that the persons of whom we speak are here among us. They are our sons and daughters. They are our friends and relatives. This recognition has not always been present. The story of the Church’s attitude to gay and lesbian people has too often been one of standing at a distance, even of prejudice, ignorance and oppression. All of us need to acknowledge this, and to repent for any part we may have had in creating it. In our baptism we covenant to seek and serve Christ in all persons. We now call the church to reaffirm the mutuality of that covenant, a covenant that encourages and enables us to love others as Christ loves us. This covenant will no longer allow us to regard those among us whose orientation is homosexual simply as “needy objects” for pastoral care. Instead we are partners, celebrating together the dignity of every human being, and reaching out together for the wholeness offered to us in the Gospel. The church affirms its traditional teaching that only the sexual union of male and female can find appropriate expression within the covenant of Holy Matrimony. However, we recognize that some homosexuals live in committed sexual relationships for mutual support, help and comfort. We wish to continue open and respectful dialogue with those who sincerely believe that sexuality expressed within a committed homosexual relationship is God’s call to them, and we affirm our common desire to seek together the fullness of life revealed in Christ. Blessing of covenanted relationships We continue to believe that committed same sex relationships should not be confused with Holy Matrimony. The house will not authorize any act that appears to promote this confusion. There is, and needs to be, ongoing discussion about how to respond appropriately to faithful and committed same sex relationships. In the context of the ongoing debate this would necessitate respectful listening and learning about the nature of such relationships and their meaning for the persons involved in them. We recognize that relationships of mutual support, help and comfort between homosexual persons exist and are to be preferred to relationships that are anonymous and transient. We disagree among ourselves whether such relationships can be expressions of God’s will and purpose. While consensus may be unlikely in the near future, we believe that study and dialogue continue to be fruitful. As we continue to listen together to scripture, tradition, and reasoned argument based on the experience of the Church,

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document 50 including and especially the experience of its gay and lesbian members, we grow in our recognition that our disagreements reflect our attempts to be faithful to the Gospel in our different personal and pastoral contexts. As long as such dialogue continues to be fruitful we believe it should continue. We are not ready to authorize the blessing of relationships between persons of the same sex. However, in interpreting the Gospel, we must always reflect on the context to which it is addressed. We are, therefore, committed to ongoing study of human sexuality and of the nature and characteristics of human intimacy and family life as it exists in our society. Ordination of gay and lesbian persons Among our clergy there are some who are gay or lesbian. Their ministries are often highly dedicated and greatly blessed. God has endowed them with many intellectual and spiritual gifts and we give thanks for their ministries. We reaffirm that sexual orientation in and of itself is not a barrier to ordination or the practice of ministry within the church. Within the wider parameters of suitability, it is the manner in which sexuality is expressed that must be considered. Our intimate relationships are an expression of the most profound possibilities for human relationships, including our relationship with God (Eph. 5:32). At ordination, candidates promise to live their lives and shape their relationships so as to provide a “wholesome example” to the people of God (BCP, 642). Exemplary behaviour for persons who are not married includes a commitment to remain chaste.

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Conclusion Our discussions over the past few years have taught us much. We do not have a common mind on all things. We see in part and we know in part. Where we disagree we need to continue to read the scriptures together and to engage in dialogue, that we might listen for what the Spirit is saying to the Church today. Source: .

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Bibliographic Essay

General historical works on the Anglican Church of Canada, national and regional, include the following: Philip Carrington, The Anglican Church in Canada: A History (Toronto: Collins, 1963); Thomas C. B. Boon, The Anglican Church from the Bay to the Rockies: A History of the Ecclesiastical Province of Rupert’s Land and Its Dioceses (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1962); Thomas R. Millman and A. R. Kelley, Atlantic Canada to 1900: A History of the Anglican Church (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1983); Frank A. Peake, From the Red River to the Arctic: Essays on Anglican Missionary Expansion in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: Canadian Church Historical Society, 1989), also published as Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 31 (1989): 1–147; Frank A. Peake, The Anglican Church in British Columbia (Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1959); C. W. [Charles William] Vernon, The Old Church in the New Dominion: The Story of the Anglican Church in Canada (London: SPCK, 1929); and, principally with respect to missions, Sydney Gould, Inasmuch: Sketches of the Beginnings of the Church of England in Canada in Relation to the Indian and Eskimo Races (Toronto: [Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada], 1917). Excellent recent biographies of most of those persons identified in this book who died before 1920 can be found in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966– ). To date, fourteen volumes have been published in this significant project of historical research, and religious figures are treated with full seriousness. The volume in which the biographical entry appears is determined by the subject’s year of death: volume 1 (1000–1700); 2 (1701–40); 3 (1741–70); 4 (1771–1800); 5 (1801–20); 6 (1821–35); 7 (1836–50); 8 (1851–60); 9 (1861–70); 10 (1871–80); 11 (1881–90); 12 (1891–1900); 13 (1901–10); and 14 (1911–20). An older work of Anglican biography is Leaders of the Canadian Church (3 vols.), edited by William Bertal Heeney (Toronto: Musson, [1918]43). Biographical data on all Canadian Anglican bishops until the mid-1970s can be found in O. R. Rowley, The Anglican Episcopate of Canada and Newfound-

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bibliographic essay land (Milwaukee: Morehouse, 1928); A. R. Kelley and D. B. Rogers, The Anglican Episcopate in Canada, vol. 2 (Toronto: Anglican Church of Canada, 1961); and David J. Carter and John W. Carter, The Anglican Episcopate in Canada, vol. 3 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1977). Histories of Anglican dioceses and parishes are numerous. The John W. Graham Library of Trinity and Wycliffe Colleges maintains a specialized collection of these histories, and its holdings, together with others in the University of Toronto library system, can be searched online at . The academic journal for Canadian Anglican history is the Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society, 600 Jarvis St. Toronto, ON M4Y 2J6. Relevant articles also appear in Anglican and Episcopal History, which is published by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, 606 Rathervue Place, Austin, TX 78705. Both are among the hundreds of journals indexed in the American Theological Library Association Religion Database, an essential bibliographical resource available in research libraries and online by subscription. Primary source material is available primarily in the various Anglican archives. The Anglican Church of Canada is highly decentralized, and so, therefore, are its archives. For matters involving the primate and the General Synod of the Church, the archives of General Synod are located at 600 Jarvis Street, Toronto, Ontario, ON M4Y 2J6. Each of the four Anglican provinces and (as of this writing) twenty-nine dioceses bears responsibility for its own archives. Many parishes also maintain their own historical records, although most deposit them in their diocesan archives. The holdings of the various provincial and diocesan Anglican archives across the country are described in the four volumes (1986– 95) of the “Records of the Anglican Church of Canada” series, available from General Synod Archives and in some research libraries. Anglican materials can also frequently be found in public and private collections. John Strachan’s papers, for instance, are housed in the Archives of Ontario, Toronto. More than 1,400 printed items dating before 1900 and related to Canadian Anglicanism are housed in the General Synod Archives. A list by date, indexed by name, is published as “Pre-1900 Imprints in General Synod Archives,” JCCHS 39 (1997): 1–339. Many printed sources before 1900 are available on microfiches published by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM), Ottawa, an independent, nonprofit organization established in 1978 and sponsored by sixty-six research libraries in nine countries. These sources are gradually being made available online as well. A similar venture in the United States is the Early American Imprints series established in 1955 by the American Antiquarian Society. The most essential primary sources for Canadian Anglican history are the records of the proceedings of the various synods, the chief instruments of governance. There are synods for each of the three highest levels of jurisdiction in Canadian Anglicanism: The General Synod of the national Church, the four

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Anglican provinces, and the dioceses. These record of proceedings are called “synod journals” (General Synod Journal, Niagara Synod Journal, etc.). There is no standard way for cataloging them in libraries, but a characteristic entry takes the following form: “Anglican Church of Canada” (or, from 1870 to 1955, “Church of England in Canada” or, before 1870, “United Church of England and Ireland”); “General Synod” (or the name of the province or the name of the diocese); and “Journal of Proceedings” (or “Journal” or “Journal of the Incorporated Synod”). Then the library will often indicate its holdings by reference to the sessions and dates of the synods concerned. The first session of General Synod, for example, was 1893, the second was 1896, the third was 1903, and so on, somewhat irregularly, to the present. A synod journal typically includes not only the minutes of a session of the synod but also committee reports and the text of an address or charge by the presiding bishop. Copies of the General Synod Journal are found in many research libraries and Anglican archives. The journals of the provincial and diocesan synods will usually be found in hard copy only in their archives, in the libraries of nearby universities, and in local historical collections. In addition, many nineteenth-century synod journals are available on microfiche in the CIHM series. For trends in writing about Canadian religious history, a succinct and insightful source in John S. Moir, “Canadian Religious Historiography: An Overview,” in Christianity in Canada (Yorkton, Sas.: Redeemer’s Voice Press, 2002), 136–50, originally published in the American Theological Library Association’s Summary of Proceedings, Forth-fifth Annual Conference (1991): 91–119. For the history of Christianity in Canada, still the most useful work (although not up to date) is the three-volume “History of the Christian Church in Canada” series, consisting of H. H. Walsh, The Church in the French Era: From Colonization to British Conquest (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966); John S. Moir, The Church in the British Era: From The British Conquest to Confederation (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972); and John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era: The First Century of Confederation (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972). The last is also available, without the subtitle, in an “update and expanded edition” (Burlington, Ont.: Welch, 1988). Other general works are: Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perin, eds., A Concise History of Christianity in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996); H. H. Walsh, The Christian Church in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1956); and Robert T. Handy, A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Two excellent works focusing on Ontario are: John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); and William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1989).

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Index

Abraham, Duncan, 192 Acadia University, 118 Adams, John, 86 Africa, missions in, 35, 176 Ahenakew, Edward, 21 Alaska, 25, 31 Alberta, places in: Blackfoot Crossing (Siksika Indian Reserve), 176; Calgary, 194; Edmonton, 181; Fort MacLeod (McLeod), 153 ———, province of, 158, 159, 178, 181 Algoma, diocese of, 16, 28, 29 Anderson, David, 88 Anglican Advance Appeal, 153 Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, 191 Anglican Church of Canada, 153 Anglican Church Women, 187 Anglican Church Women’s Association, Newfoundland, 171 Anglican Congress (1954), 156 Anglican Congress (1963), 37 Anglican Consultative Council, 38, 189 Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples, 43 Anglican Fellowship for Social Action, 73, 135 Anglican Fellowship of Prayer, 136 Anglican Forward Movement, 22, 30, 105 Anglican Free Press, 133, 157 Anglican Journal, 125 Anglican Magazine, 187 Anglican National Commission, 152, 153, 182, 204, 135 Anglican Renewal Ministries, 136, 137 Anglicans for Renewal, 137 Anglican Theological College, Vancouver, 75 Anglican Women’s Training College, 174, 184, 186

Anne (Queen), 197 Antigua, 176 Archbishops Commission on the Ministry of Women, 188 Archbishops’ Western Canada Fund, 30, 177 architecture, 122, 125, 143 Arctic, diocese of, 116 Ardag, S. B., 140 Aristotle, 86 Armitage, Ramsay, 138 Arthurson, Charles, 41 Associated Parishes, 134 Athabasca, diocese of, 21, 31, 98 Australia, 88, 90, 100 Ayckbowm, Emily, 173 Baldwin, Maurice, 117 Baldwin, Robert, 87, 126 Banks, Ethel Tulloch, 136 Banks, John, 136 Baptists, 27, 32, 69, 72, 118, 120 Barnabas Anglican Ministries, 135, 137 Barr, Isaac, 23 Barth, Karl, 150, 161 Bathurst (Lord), 62 Beardy, Gordon, 45 Bentham, Jeremy, 9 Berger, Peter, 77, 162 Bermuda, 58 Berton, Pierre, 160 Bethune, Alexander Neil, 91, 119, 127, 130, 131 Beveridge, William Henry, 72 Beverley, Alton Ray, 189 Bibby, Reginald, 162 Bidwell, Marshall, 64

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Big Child (Indian), 20 Binney, Herbert 87, 88, 122, 128 Bishop’s Messengers, 178–80 Bishop Strachan School, 173, 180 Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, Quebec, 25, 128, 131 Blackwater v. Plint, 44 Blake, Samuel Hume, 32–33, 42, 46, 117 Bompas, William Carpenter, 21 Bond, William Bennett, 22, 30, 106, 147 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 150 Book of Alternative Services, 103, 134, 157 Book of Common Prayer, 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 24, 69, 99, 103, 104, 120, 123, 134, 137, 138, 148, 156, 187, 205 Boswell, John, 195 Bothwell, John, 189 Brandon, diocese of, 179, 183 Bray, Thomas, 13, 24 British Columbia, Anglican province of, 98, 101 ———, diocese of, 15, 25, 27, 66, 90, 121 ———, places in: Cecil Lake, 180; Fort St. John, 180; Hudson’s Hope, 180; Lytton, 32, 44; Metlakatla, 25; Port Alberni, 44; Prince Rupert, 25, 136; Taylor, 180; Vancouver, 23, 194; Victoria, 25; Yale, 173 ———, province of, 16, 17, 25, 44, 69, 170, 178 Brooke, Frances Moore, 167 Brooks, Phillips, 147 Brown, Miss, 176 Budd, Henry, 21 Cabot, John (Jean), 12 Caledonia, diocese of, 16, 31, 182 Calgary, diocese of, 16 Calvin, John, 115, 150 Cambridge University, 97, 123, 130 Cameron, John Hillyard, 127 Campbell, Kim, 196 Canada, Anglican province of, 28, 92, 97–101, 123, 174 Canada and Christendom, 135 Canada, dominion of, 92 ———, province of (1841–67), 67, 87, 90–92, 120 Canadian Churchman, 109, 125, 153, 155, 182, 190, 191 Canadian Church Missionary Association, 29, 35, 129 Canadian Church Sunday School Institute, 159 Canadian Council of Child and Family Welfare, 184

Canadian Girls in Training, 184 canons, 29, 72, 83, 85, 86, 91–93, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107–9, 111, 124, 152, 153, 175, 185 Cariboo, diocese of, 16, 33, 42–43, 191 Carleton, Sir Guy, 52, 57 Carmichael, James, 116, 117 Carrington, Philip, 21, 103, 106, 154 Cartwright, Richard, 53, 61 cathedrals, controversy over, 125 Caton, Ina, 185 Centre for Christian Studies, 186 Charles I, 55 Charles II, 12, 17 Charleston, S.C., 55 China, missions in, 35, 36, 176 Christian Outlook, 135 Christie, Amelia Bowman, 26 Christie, William Plenderleath, 26 Church, The (newspaper), 124, 127 Church House (property), 105, 152, 153 Church Militant, The, 182 Church Missionary Society, 16, 17, 21, 22, 25, 33, 36, 97, 98, 100, 128 Church of England, 11, 13, 18, 24, 29, 37, 45, 51, 52, 54, 58, 63, 65, 69, 84, 93–95, 97, 99, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124, 127, 128, 135, 157, 172–74, 179, 180, 182, 184 Church of England Temperance Society, 70 Church of England Women’s Association, Newfoundland, 171, 187 Church Record Publications, 155 church societies, 27–28, 85–86, 118–19 church style (churchmanship): defined, 7–9, 16, 78, 89, 103, 114– 17 Church Witness, The (newspaper), 124 Clarke, William, 125 Clark, Howard, 97, 108, 112, 138, 153–55, 159, 187 Clark, S. D., 68 Codner, Samuel, 22 Cody, Henry John, 36, 148 Colborne, Sir John, 61 Colenso, John William, 94, 95, 143 Coles, George, 87 Colonial and Continental Church Society, 22, 24–26, 30, 90, 116, 128 Columbia University, 55, 73 Congregationalists, 25 Constantine, 83 Constitutional Act (1791), 59–61, 99 Coome, Hannah Grier, 173 Corn Laws, 64 Coster, George, 27, 118, 122, 139 Cranmer, Thomas, 115 Creal, Michael, 159

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Crew, Louie, 194 Cridge, Edward, 25, 123, 124, 139, 204 Crockett, William, 150 Cronyn, Benjamin, 117, 126, 130–31 Cumberland (England), 177 Dalhousie University, 129 Daughters of the King, 184 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 32, 34 Davis, Charles, 161 Deaconess and Missionary Training House, Toronto, 174, 183, 185, 186 deaconesses, 174–75, 186–87 De Blaquiere, Peter Boyle, 87, 126 Desbrisay, Theophilus, 51 Dewey, John, 160 Dixon, Leonard A., 106 documents: Address from Some Women of Ottawa to the Board of the DFMS (1885), 169, 290–91; Address of the Provincial Synod of Canada to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sept. 16, 1865, 95, 255–56; Anglican Professors in Theological Education, Statement (1975), 190, 301–2; Bishop George Hills to the Church Committee of Douglas and Lillooet, British Comumbia, 1861, 66, 242–43; Bishop John Inglis to Archdeacon George Coster (1836), 27, 217–18; Canon on Deaconesses (1921), 175, 294–95; excerpt from Anglican National Commission Report (1931), 182, 297–98; excerpt from Benjamin Cronyn, “Objections . . . to the Teaching of Trinity College” (1862), 130–31, 264–69; excerpt from Dyson Hague, “The History of the Higher Criticism,” 146, 273– 75; excerpt from Egerton Ryerson, Story of My Life, 63, 240–42; excerpt from Emily Murphy, Janey Canuck in the West (1910), 181, 295–96; excerpt from John Webster, “Jesus and the Gospel” (1997), 151, 281–82; excerpt from “Manifesto of Concerned Clergy” (1975), 191, 304–6; excerpt from Royal Instructions to Governor James Murray, Quebec, Dec. 7, 1763, 52, 227–28; excerpt from a Sermon by Charles Inglis, “The Duty of Honouring the King,” Jan. 30, 1780, 55, 230–31; excerpts from Anglican Primates and Metropolitans, Toronto Statement on “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence” (1963) 38, 221–24; excerpts from Bishops of General Synod, “Pastoral Letter” (1893), 101, 256–59; excerpts from Eugene R. Fairweather, “Scripture in Tradition” (1959), 150, 278–81; excerpts from General

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Synod, Committee on Women’s Work, “The Future Pattern of Women’s Work in the Church” (1955), 185, 298–301; excerpts from H. J. Cody, “Sermon” (March 5, 1934), 148, 275–78; excerpts from Joanne Dewart, “Address to General Synod” (1975), 190, 303; excerpts from John Strachan, “A Sermon Preached at York, Upper Canada, Third of July, 1825, on the Death of the Late Lord Bishop of Quebec,” 62, 236–40; excerpts from John West, The Substance of a Journal during a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America, 18, 211–16; excerpts from Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Long v. Gray (1863), 94, 253–55; excerpts from Letters Patent Appointing Charles Inglis Bishop of Nova Scotia, Aug. 1787, 58, 83, 233–36; excerpts from “Minutes of a Conference of the Bishops of Quebec, Toronto, Newfoundland, Fredericton, and Montreal, Holden at Quebec from Sept. 24th to Oct. 1st, 1851,” 88, 92, 247–49; excerpts from Report of the Anglican National Commission (April 1931), 153, 283–86; excerpts from the Rule of the S.S.J.D. (1885), 173, 293–94; excerpts from Taken for Granted (1967), 154, 286–88; excerpts from [Thomas Brock Fuller], “Thoughts on the Present State and Future Prospects of the Church of ENgland in Canada” (1836), 84, 243–47; from Peguis, Chief of the Red River Indians (1838), 21, 216–17; from Samuel Hume Blake, 33, 42, 218–20; General Board of Religious Education, “A Basic Statement on the New Curriculum” (1962), 160, 288– 89; House of Bishops, “Statement of Counsel” (1975), 109, 259–60; Human Sexuality: A Statement by the Anglican Bishops of Canada (1997), 196, 307–10; John Medley, “Address” (1845), 125, 261–64; John Travers Lewis, “The Ottawa Malcontents and the Archibshop of Ontario” (1895), 131, 269–73; Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe to Henry Dundas, Nov. 1792, 53, 228–30; Loyalists’ Letter of 1783, 57, 231–33; Michael Peers, “Message to the National Native Convocation,” Minaki, Ont., Aug. 6, 1993, 45, 224–25; A Parish in the Diocese of Nova Scotia, “Declaration” (1854), 89, 251–52; Prolocutor’s Ruling on the Admission of Women to General Synod (1924), 182, 297; Province of Canada, “An Act to Engable the Members of the United Church of England and Ireland in Canada to Meet in Synod” (1857),

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90, 252–53; Provincial Synod of Canada, Resolution on Ritual (1868), 123, 261; Report of the Indian and Eskimo Commission (1931), 34, 159, 220–21; Sections I–III of the Nova Scotia Act of 1758, 51, 225–26; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Instructions for the Clergy Employ’d by the Society (1706), 14, 85, 208–11; Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Troonto, “Declaration” (Oct. 26, 1854), 89, 249–51; Synod of the Diocese of Toronto, Memorial on Ritual (1868), 123, 260–61; W.A., “The Aim and Plan” (1911), 170, 291–93 Domestic and Foreign Mission Society (Anglican province of Canada), 28, 29, 35, 100, 168, 170, 176 Dominion Churchman, 124, 125, 132 Dorcas groups, 167, 186 Dover, Delaware, 55 Draper, William Henry, 87 Duncan, William, 25 Dundas, Henry, 53 Durham (Lord), 61 Du Vernet, Frederick, 31 Eastern Orthodoxy, 95 Edinburgh Review, 64 Edmonton, diocese of, 16, 153 Elizabeth I, 51, 197 Emmanuel College, Saskatchewan, 23, 24 Episcopal Church, U.S., 8, 29, 39, 55–57, 84–85, 88, 90, 91, 95, 97, 125, 134, 145, 160, 169, 174, 191, 192, 194, 195 Essentials (conferences), 137 Essex (England), 18 Evangelical Churchman, 125, 132 Evangelical Fellowship, 135 Evangelical Group Movement, 135 Exeter (England), 119, 122 Fairweather, Eugene, 133, 149, 150, 190 Farthing, John Cragg, 116, 129 Fauquier, Frederick Dawson, 28 Feild, Edward, 22, 66, 87, 88, 120, 125 Feilding, Charles, 135, 185 Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, 24, 177, 180 feminism, 137–38 Ferry, James, 110–11 Finlay, Terrence, 110–11 First Nations, 15, 17–22, 25, 30–35, 40, 41, 75, 77, 108, 159, 174 Fleming, Archibald, 116–17 Foucault, Michel, 192 Fowler, Marguerita, 179–80

France, 17 Fredericton, diocese of, 16, 65–66, 87, 89, 90, 92, 118, 121, 125, 129, 149 French Canadians, 12, 25, 26, 51–52, 59, 61 Freud, Sigmund, 144, 193 Friedan, Betty, 185 Frobisher, Martin, 12 Froude, Richard Hurrell, 193 Fugitive Slave Act (U.S.A.), 23 Fulford, Francis, 26, 87, 92 Fuller, Thomas Brock, 84, 85, 88, 112, 121 Fundamentals, The, 146 Gardner, George, 171 Garnsworthy, Lewis, 155, 162 GATT-fly (group), 76 General Synod, general references to, 32, 33, 39, 43, 76, 82, 96, 128, 150, 171, 187 ———, meetings and decisions of, 30, 34–36, 38, 40, 41, 45, 71, 72, 76, 97, 101, 103, 109, 110, 134, 152–55, 157, 160, 175, 178, 182–84, 189–91, 195, 196 ———, organization and evolution of, 29, 30, 39, 71, 89, 97, 99–110, 121, 125, 129, 130, 138, 139, 152–58, 182, 187, 188, 190 ———, units of: Archives, 42; Doctrine and Worship Committee, 134, 138, 157; Commission on Marriage and Related Matters, 185; Commission on Women, 189; Committee on Moral and Social Reform, 72; Committee on Organization, 155; Committee on Public Worship, 157; Committee on Women’s Work, 183, 184; Council for Social Service, 71–73, 75, 104–7, 154, 158; Executive Council, 77, 153, 155; General Board of Religious Education, 104–7, 125, 138, 154, 159–61, 178; general secretary’s office, 108, 153; general treasurer, 153; Information and Stewardship, 105, 154; Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC), 30–36, 104, 105, 107, 153–55, 170, 176, 179, 187; National Executive Council, 105, 107, 109, 110, 154, 155; Partners in Mission, 11, 38, 39; Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, 39, 40, 42; Program Committee, 38, 107, 108, 155, 187; Program, Planning, and Research, 155; Public Social Responsibility Unit, 76; Women’s Unit, 138 General Theological Seminary, New York, 149 George IV, 63 Ghana, 176 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 12, 51 Gilson, Etienne, 149 Girl Guides, 184

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Girls’ Friendly Society, 172, 184 Gisborne, Francis H., 153 Gladstone, W. E., 115 Gordon’s (Indian residential school), Punnichy, Saskatchewan, 33 Gore, Charles, 148, 149, 179 Gorham, George, 119–20, 125 Gould, Sydney, 36, 105, 106, 153, 170 Graham, Betty, 185 Grant, John Webster, 20, 22 Granville Street Baptist Church, Halifax, 118 Grasett, Henry J., 111 Gray, J. W. D., 118, 124, 139 Guild of St. Faith’s, 179, 180 Gwynne, Mrs., 177 Hague, Dyson 146, 204 Halliwell v. Synod of Ontario, 91 Hamilton, Charles, 170 Harrison, Ernest, 160 Harrison, John, 12 Harris, Reginald V., 118 Hasell, Frances Hatton Eva, 177, 179, 180 Haslam, Florence, 176 Hellmuth, Isaac, 23 Hemmerick, William, 109 Hendry Report, 40, 41, 108 Henry Budd College, 21 Henry VII, 12 Henry VIII, 57, 83, 85 Hills, George, 25, 66, 70, 123, 124, 130, 139 Hiltz, Robert A., 106, 178 Hong Kong, 188 Hooker, Richard, 4 Hopkins, Ellice, 193 Horton Academy, 118 Hoskin Group, 134 House of Bishops, 110, 175, 183, 186, 190, 191, 195–96 Howe, Joseph, 87 Hudson’s Bay Company, 17–19, 21, 25, 98, 124, 139 Huron College, 128, 131 Huron, diocese of, 15, 23, 27, 33, 39, 90, 91, 99, 123, 126, 130, 180, 182, 191 Hydro-Québec, 77 hymnals, 116, 128, 132, 139 India, mission in Kangra, 36, 176 Indian residential schools, 11, 18, 19, 20, 31–35, 37, 40–44, 46, 68, 77, 175, 183 Ingham, Michael, 196 Inglis, Charles, 54–56, 59, 65, 66, 83 Inglis, John, 27, 63, 67, 118

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integrity, 194 International Order of the Daughters of the Empire, 184 Ireland, 26, 52, 54, 117, 147 Jackson, John, 12, 14, 24 Jameson, Anna Murphy, 167 Jamestown, Virginia, 51 Jane Eyre, 193 Japanese Canadians, 72–73 Japan, mission in, 29, 35, 36, 129, 176 Jefferson, Philip, 160 Jenkins, Charles, 99–100 Jews, 72–73 Johnson v. Glen, 91 Jones, James Edmund, 128 Jones, Mabel, 175 Judd, William Wallace, 106 Keewatin, diocese of, 16 Kent, John, 141 Kilrush (Ireland), 7 Kingdon, Hollingworth Tully, 149 King, Edward (bishop of Lincoln), 123 King’s College, Aberdeen, 61 King’s College, Fredericton, 67, 128 King’s College, New York, 55 King’s College, Nova Scotia, 25, 67, 73, 128–29, 133 King’s College, Toronto, 67, 126 Kootenay, diocese of, 16, 75 Lalonde, Marc, 74 Lambeth Conferences, 38, 39, 95, 103, 143, 175, 182, 186, 188–89 Langley, Carol, 192 Langton, Anne, 167 Latimer Hall, Vancouver, 23, 128 Lawrence, Charles, 51 Letter Leaflet, The, 169, 170 Lewis, John Travers, 95, 126–27, 130–31 liturgical movement, 156–57 Liturgy Canada, 134 Living Message, The, 170, 187 Lloyd, George Exton, 23, 175, 177 London, 55, 56, 86, 88, 122 Long v. Gray, 93–94, 98, 111 Lux Mundi, 148–49 Luxton, George, 39, 108, 160 Machray Review, 134 Machray, Robert, 30, 69, 97, 98, 100, 101, 106, 112, 125 Mangina, Joseph, 151

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Maintoba, places in: Brandon, 18; Devon Park (Devon Mission), 20; Fort Churchill, 18; Norway House, 18; Red River, 18, 100; Swan River, 179, 181; The Pas, 21, 180; Winnipeg, 100, 178, 179; York Factory, 18 ———, providence of, 23, 69, 98 marriage issues, 185 Marsh, Leonard Charles, 72 Maryland, 13 Matthews, Victoria, 191, 196 McCallion, Hazel Journeaux, 184 McDonald, Robert, 21, 31 McGill University, 67 McIntyre, Clara, 182 McNeill, John J., 194 McWilliam, Joanne, 190 Medley, John, 66, 85, 87, 119, 125, 126, 128, 149 Methodists, 55, 71, 72, 83, 124, 158 Mildmay Deaconess House, London, England, 174 Millman, Thomas, 27 Minnesota, 100 Mohawk Institute, Brantford, Ontario, 32, 33, 42 Montreal Diocesan College, 128, 147 Montreal, diocese of, 15, 27, 30, 56, 65, 87, 90, 92, 101, 116, 123, 130, 168, 191 Moosonee, diocese of, 21, 98, 175, 176 Mothers’ Union, 172, 184, 187 Mountain, George, 87, 88, 90, 100 Mountain, Jacob, 58, 60, 62, 65–68, 112 Mowatt v. Clarke, 44 Murphy, Arthur, 180–81 Murphy, Emily (Ferguson), 180–82 Murray, Sir James, 52 National Council of Women, 184 Needle’s Eye, 76 Netten, Edward, 155 New Brunswick, places in: Fort Cumberland (Fort Beauséjour), 14; Fredericton, 125; Maramichi, 126; Saint John, 124 ———, province of, 27, 32, 51, 58, 61, 66, 87, 139 New England Company, 32, 65 New France, 26 New Jersey, 135 New Westminster, diocese of, 16, 191, 196 New York City, 55, 57, 63 ———, churches in: Grace Church, 174; St. George’s Church, 147; Trinity Church, 55 New Zealand, 16, 65, 88, 100 Newbigin, Lesslie, 161

Newfoundland, diocese of, 22, 27, 66, 87, 90, 125, 171 ———, places in: Bonavista, 14; Harbour Grace, 14; Labrador, 175; Placentia, 14; St. John’s, 12, 24, 45, 66, 118, 119, 171, 193; Trinity Bay, 14 ———, province of, 12, 14, 31, 52, 58, 68, 87 Newman, John Henry, 118, 119, 193 Niagara, diocese of, 85, 153, 159, 191 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 161 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 144 Nishga, 75 North (Lord), 57 North West Company, 18 Nova Scotia, diocese of, 15, 27, 56, 58, 63, 70, 87, 89, 90, 92, 118, 121, 129, 135 ———, places in: Annapolis, 12, 59; Cornwallis, 14; Halifax, 14, 24, 59, 73, 88, 122, 168; Lunenburg, 14 ———, province of, 14, 23, 51, 57, 59–61, 66, 67, 73, 87, 120, 135 Nunavut (Territory), places in: Baffin Island, 12; Pangnirtung, 171 O’Donovan, Oliver, 151 offertory, 126 Ontario, Anglican province of, 98 ———, diocese of, 91, 102, 112, 123, 126, 130–32 ———, places in: Belleville, 173; Brockville, 6, 131; Brantford, 32, 33, 42; Cookstown, 180; Cornwall, 59, 62; Dresden, 23; Kingston, 53, 59, 61, 85, 126, 127; London, 23, 38; Mississauga, 184; Napanee, 53; Oshawa, 137; Ottawa, 97, 127, 131, 137, 168, 169; Peterborough, 167; Sault Ste. Marie, 28; Scarborough, 187; Sioux Lookout, 33; Tecumseh, 140; Toronto, 23, 37, 62, 101, 124, 148, 173; Woodstock, 88, 116 ———, province of, 23, 52, 59–61, 63, 66, 135, 194 Orange Order, 6, 180 Order of St. Luke, 136 ordination of women, 188, 189, 191, 192 Osler, Featherstone Lake, 140 Ottawa, diocese of, 132, 153 Owen, Derwyn, 16, 69, 153 Owen, D. R. G., 133 Oxford, 65, 136, 179, 193 Oxford movement, 65, 115, 119, 122, 148, 172 Oxford University, 18, 65, 128, 151, 193 Packer, James I., 135, 137 Palestine, missions in, 35

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index Paley, William 4, 63, 86 Palmer, Roland, 138 parish and cathedral churches: All Saints, Dunham, Quebec, 167; All Saints, Windsor, Ontario, 176; Bishop Cronyn Memorial, London, Ontario, 146, 176; Christ Church, Montreal, Quebec, 60, 85, 147, 161; Christ Church, Petrolia, Ontario, 99; Christ Church, Ottawa, Ontario, 153; Christ Church, Victoria, British Columbia, 123, 139; Holy Trinity, Toronto, Ontario, 123; Holy Trinity, Quebec, 123; Redeemer, Toronto, Ontario, 146; St. Clement, Toronto, Ontario, 76; St. Elizabeth, Etobicoke, Ontario, 136; St. George, Halifax, Ontario, 117; St. George, Kingston, Ontario, 127; St. George, Lytton, British Columbia, 32, 33, 45; St. George, Ottawa, Ontario, 131, 172; St. George, Toronto, Ontario, 112; St. James, Ottawa, Ontario, 172; St. James, Toronto, Ontario, 122, 147, 186, 192; St. James, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 23; St. John the Baptist, St. John’s, Newfoundland, 125; St. John the Evangelist, Montreal, 123; St. John, Thorold, Ontario, 169; St. John, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 18, 125; St. John, York Mills, Toronto, Ontario, 155; St. Mary Magdalene, Picton, Ontario, 167; St. Paul, Abbotsford, Quebec, 167; St. Paul, Bloor Street, Toronto, Ontario, 36, 148, 186; St. Paul, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 14, 51, 73, 84, 118, 122, 146; St. Paul, London, Ontario, 130; St. Paul, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, 14; St. Peter, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 133; St. Peter, Cobourg, Ontario, 119, 168; St. Thomas, Belleville, Ontario, 173; St. Thomas, Toronto, Ontario, 173; Trinity, Saint John, New Brunswick, 27, 118 parish communion movement, 156 Parsons, Robert J., 87 Partners in Mission Program, 38 Peers, Michael, 45, 109, 139 Peguis (Red River Indian chief), 21 Persons Case, 181 Philadelphia, 55 Pickering, William, 154 Powles, Cyril, 190 Pratt, Renate, 76 Pratt, Richard, 35 Prayer Book Society, 134, 137, 157 Presbyterians, 25, 42, 59, 83, 97, 124, 126, 172 Price-Waterhouse report, 138, 155, 160 primacy, 69, 95, 100, 101, 104, 106–7, 138, 153–55

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Primate’s Theological Commission, 139 Prince Edward Island, place in: Charlottetown, 51 ———, province of, 27, 51, 66, 67, 87 Prince, Samuel Henry, 73 provincial synods, authority of, 102–4 Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 119, 122, 143 Qu’Appelle, diocese of, 16, 33, 41, 130, 178 Quebec Act (1774), 52 Quebec, diocese of, 15, 27, 28, 56, 62, 85, 87, 90, 92, 121, 123 ———, places in: Chambly, 85; Christieville, 26; Hull, 172; Lennoxville, 168; Montreal, 124, 137; Quebec, 88, 89 ———, province of, 24, 26, 52, 56–61, 66–68 Rainsford, William, 147 Red Cross, 184 Reed, James, 110, 195 Reformed Episcopal Church, 124, 131 Regent College, Vancouver, 135 ritualism, 121–22 Rochester, England, 180 Roman Catholics, 4, 6–7, 12, 18, 37, 42, 51–53, 59, 64, 69, 134, 136, 148, 150, 161, 194 Rupert’s Land, diocese of, 16, 29, 90, 97, 98, 100, 155 ———, province of, 17, 21–23, 97, 98, 101–3, 129, 152, 154, 170 Rutgers University, 194 Ryan, H. R. S., 102 Ryerson, Egerton, 63 Sacretan, Muriel, 179 same-sex issues, 110, 111, 139, 192, 193–97 Saskatchewan, diocese of 16, 20, 24, 41, 98, 175 ———, places in: Cumberland House, 21; Grenfell, 177; La Ronge 20; Lloydminster, 24; Nipawin (Nepowewin), 20; Prince Albert, 23, 24; Punnichy, 33; Regina, 178 ———, province of, 23, 30, 181 Saskatoon, diocese of, 185 Sayle, Iris, 178 Scholarly Engagement with Anglican Doctrine (organization), 151 Scotland, 61, 97 Scott, Edward W., 75–76, 189 Selkirk (Earl of), 18 Selwyn, George, 65, 85 Shaftesbury (Lord), 143 Sheraton, James P., 125 Sherlock, Miss, 176

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Shoemaker, Samuel and Helen, 136 Sierra Leone, 176 Simcoe, John Graves, 53 Simpson, George, 19 Sir George Williams University, 161 sisterhoods: Order of All Hallows, 174; Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, 173; Sisterhood of St. Mary, Peekskill, 173; Sisters of St. Mary the Virgin, Wantage, 173; Sisters of the Church, 173 Smith, Inez, 182 Snell, George, 160 Snowdon, J. M., 131 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 24, 27 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 13– 17, 24, 25, 27, 53, 55, 56, 65, 84, 98, 100, 116, 127, 179 Society of St. John the Evangelist, 138 Somerville, Thomas David, 155, 189 Sorrento Centre, 75 South Africa, 76, 93–95 South American Mission Society, 39 Soward, Reginald, 188, 189 Soward, Ruth, 185 Spencer, Aubrey, 22, 23 Starblanket (Indian), 20 St. Christopher’s College, Blackheath, England, 177, 179, 180 St. Christopher’s Training School, Victoria, British Columbia, 183 Steen, Frederick Julius, 147 Stewart, Charles James 64, 130 St. John’s College, Winnipeg, 16, 18, 25 St. John’s Convalescent Hospital, Willowdale, 173 St. Mark’s College, Vancouver, 128 Storrs, Monica, 180 Stott, John, 135 Strachan, John, 61, 63, 64, 66, 74, 85, 87, 88, 91, 96, 97, 112, 117, 119, 122, 127, 130, 152, 204 Stuart, John, 61 Student Christian Movement, 75 Sullivan, Edward, 28 Sunday School Caravan, 177–78 Sunday School by Post, 177, 180 Sunday schools, 27, 37, 104, 106, 116, 132, 146, 159, 160, 167– 168, 173, 177, 180, 183 Sustentation Fund, 16 Sweatman, Arthur, 106, 116, 126, 132, 173, 174 Sykes, Stephen, 204 Talisman Energy of Calgary, 77 Taskforce on the Churches and Corporate

Responsibility, 76 Tasmania, 58, 100 temperance, 70–71, 126, 167, 171–72, 181, 197 Temple, William, 69, 135 Thomas Aquinas, 149 Tilley, Samuel Leonard, 87 Tilton, Roberta Elizabeth (Odell), 169 Tongues of Fire, 137 “Toronto blessing,” 137 Toronto, diocese of, 15, 27, 56, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 109, 111, 119, 123, 126, 129, 130, 136, 138, 150, 162, 168, 188, 189, 191 Treaty of Paris (1763), 52 Trinity College, Dublin, 6, 54, 130, 131 Trinity College, Toronto, 25, 35, 110, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 138, 153, 154, 174, 190, 193 Trinity Episcopal Church, Boston, 147 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 41, 74, 193, 194 Tutty, William, 14 Uniacke, Robert Fitzgerald, 117 United Church of Canada, 42, 44, 109, 110, 174, 186, 195 University of Alberta, 161 University of British Columbia, 75 University of Keele, 135 University of Lethbridge, 162 University of Manitoba, 69, 75 University of New Brunswick, 67 University of Toronto, 67, 127, 130, 148, 174, 176 University of Western Ontario, 131 Upper Canada Bible and Common Prayer Book Society, 167 Vermont, 90 Vernon, Charles W., 106 Victoria (Queen), 197 Vincent, Thomas, 21 Vineyard, 137 Virginia, 59 volunteers in mission, 38 Warburton, William, 9 Washington, George, 55 Webster, John, 151 West, John, 18, 19, 21 Whitaker, George, 130, 131 White, William, 55 White, William Charles, 36 Wilkinson, Frederick, 136 Williams, James, 94 Willoughby, Mark, 22, 26 Wilson, Sir Daniel, 174 Wilson, Sybil, 174

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:53:14.

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index Yale College (U.S.), 25 Young Men’s Christian Association, 126, 143 Young Women’s Christian Association, 172, 184 Yukon, diocese of, 182 Zambia, mission in, 176

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Wodehouse, Roberta E., 182 Wolfall, Robert, 12 women’s auxiliaries, 29, 31, 36, 37, 72, 168–71, 176, 183, 184, 186, 187 Wood, Ann, 62 Wootten, Frank, 124, 125 World Vision, 40 Wright, Bertha, 172 Wycliffe College, 23, 29, 32, 35, 73, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138, 146, 147, 148, 151, 174, 180, 190

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:53:14.

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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

alan l. hayes is Bishops Frederick and Heber Wilkinson Professor of Church History at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, and chair of the historical department of the Toronto School of Theology. Among other publications, he is joint author of The Parish and Cathedral of St. James’, Toronto, 1797–1997: A Collaborative History and editor of By Grace Co-Workers: Building the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 1780–1980. He is also an editor of the journal Anglican and Episcopal History.

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:53:14.

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Studies in Anglican History

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The Education of Phillips Brooks John F. Woolverton Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection Peter Iver Kaufman Accommodating High Churchmen: The Clergy of Sussex, 1700–1745 Jeffrey S. Chamberlain The Nature of Salvation: Theological Consensus in the Episcopal Church, 1801–73 Robert W. Prichard Black Bishop: Edward T. Demby and the Struggle for Racial Equality in the Episcopal Church Michael J. Beary Noble Powell and the Episcopal Establishment in the Twentieth Century David Hein Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism: The Mass, the Masses, and the Music Hall John Richard Orens All Things Human: Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the Episcopal Church Michael Bourgeois Anglicans in Canada: Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective Alan L. Hayes

Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:53:14.

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Hayes, Alan L.. Anglicans in Canada : Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=3413963. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-05 19:53:14.

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