HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998 Canadian Society of Church History
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998 Canadian Society of Church History Annual Conference University of Ottawa 29-30 May 1998 Edited by Bruce L. Guenther ©Copyright 1998 by the authors and the Canadian Society of Church History Printed in Canada ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Historical Papers June 2/3 (1988)- Annual. A selection of papers delivered at the Society’s annual meeting. Place of publication varies. Continues: Proceedings of the Canadian Society of Church History, ISSN 0842-1056. ISSN 0848-1563 ISBN 0-9696744-0-6 (1993) 1. Church History—Congresses. 2. Canada—Church history—Congresses. l. Canadian Society of Church history. BR570.C322 fol. 277.1 C90-030319-0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Papers The Gospel of Success in Canada: Charles W. Gordon (Ralph Connor) as Exemplar ROBERT A. KELLY 5 The Church as Employer: Social Ideology and Ecclesial Practice During Labour Conflict OSCAR COLE-ARNAL 17 The Central Canada Presbytery: Prospects, Perplexities, Problems ELDON HAY 29 Through the Eyes of The Tattler: Concerns of Baptist Youth in Rural Nova Scotia, 1933-1940 RUSSELL PRIME 45 The Calgary Local Council of Women: Traditional Female Christianity in Action (1895-1897 and 1912-1933) ANNE WHITE 67 “Casting Sand in the Eyes”: Conrad Brasco’s Literary Dispute with the Orthodox Reformed Preachers in Elberfeld, 1704-1706 DOUGLAS H. SHANTZ 89 Building Identities: St George’s Anglican Churches, Kingston, Upper Canada, 1792-1826 CARMEN NIELSON VARTY 113 CSCH President’s Address “Give me that old-time Religion”: The Postmodernist Plot Of the Theologians PAUL H. FRIESEN 129 4 Contents Please Note: Papers by Elizabeth Elbourne, Thomas Evans, Gillis J. Harp, Karle Hele, Louise Johnston, Kevin Kee, and Michael Owen were not made available for publication. Cover photo: A detail of “Old Christ Church, Ottawa,” in Canadian Illustrated News, 13 April 1872. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Canada. HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History HISTORICAL PAPERS 1998: Canadian Society of Church History The Gospel of Success in Canada: Charles W. Gordon (Ralph Connor) as Exemplar ROBERT A. KELLY Scholars have long been interested in the ideas of success that drive Americans and have studied the literature that communicated these ideas and values extensively.1 If we can trust the self-help literature they read, Americans in most of the nineteenth century agreed with figures such as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin that success was a matter of character. If anything, low origins and lack of education were a help, for they forced the development of character and the habit of industry. Americans believed that character was developed though strenuous effort. Natural endowments did not matter, nor did an adverse origin. The successful were those who developed a character that featured the virtues of frugality, loyalty, industry, humility, and so on and so on. These virtues would be rewarded with success. Among the most active success and self-help writers in the nine- teenth century were Protestant ministers, especially Congregationalists, with Unitarians and Methodists, some Presbyterians and Baptists, and a few Episcopalians. Prime examples were William Makepeace Thayer, a Congregationalist; Russell Herman Conwell, a Baptist; and the most famous American success novelist of them all, Horatio Alger, Jr., a Unitarian. That Unitarians were active in success literature illustrates an important characteristic of the literature: it was not written by the conservatives of the time, but by the more progressive mainline Protes- tants. Among the lists of late nineteenth century clerical success novelists and tract writers were a number of clergy who were identified with the Historical Papers 1998: Canadian Society of Church History 6 The Gospel of Success in Canada social gospel movement. Perhaps the best known of these was Congrega- tionalist pastor Charles Shelton of Topeka, Kansas, whose In His Steps (1896), has sold millions of copies and is still in circulation. The purpose of this essay is to study whether or not equivalent authors in Canada put forward similar ideas about what is necessary to be a successful person. Though Canadian historians have apparently been less interested in the Canadian ethos of success than American historians have been in the American success ethic, there are reasons to believe that there are similarities, especially between the United States and Anglophone Canada. Both of these cultures derived from the values of the English Reformation and Enlightenment and both were affected by the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century. Several studies have shown that the success idea in England’s Puritan and Enlightenment colonies is little different from that in the mother country,2 so we might assume that Canadian visions of success are similar to American. At least two examples of Canadian success tracts develop the same themes as their American counterparts of the same eras (1920s and 1970s).3 To test the hypothesis that Canadian clerical writers of the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were presenting ideas of success similar to the American clerical writers of that time, this essay will examine the novels of Charles W. Gordon who wrote under the pen name of Ralph Connor. I have selected Gordon/Connor for two reasons. First, Charles Gordon fits the profile of equivalent American authors almost exactly, being a late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century Presbyterian clergyman committed to the social gospel. Second, Ralph Connor was one of Canada’s most popular novelists of the pre-World War I era. His novels of that period were best sellers in Canada and Connor was often the Canadian novelist most widely read outside of Canada. Gordon was born in Glengarry County, Canada West, in 1860. In 1870 his family moved to Oxford County. In 1883 he graduated from the University of Toronto and in 1887 from Knox College. He was ordained in 1890 and served a variety of mining, lumber, and railroad camps centred on Banff from 1890-1893. Beginning in 1894 he served as pastor of St. Stephen’s Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg. Under his leadership the church grew to a thousand members and Gordon participated in commu- nity life as a moderate progressive. During the first part of World War I he served as a chaplain at the front and after 1916 spoke widely in Canada to encourage support for the war effort and in the United States to encourage Robert A. Kelly 7 that country to enter the war. Gordon was involved in the Winnipeg General Strike and its aftermath and was moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Canada in 1921-22. He was a strong advocate of church union and represented the United Church at the 1927 World Conference of Faith and Order. Even in the last decade of his life he spoke out against fascism and called on Canadians to institute national systems of social services. He died in 1937.4 In order to do this preliminary study I have read seven of the Ralph Connor novels: Black Rock (the first Ralph Conner novel, 1898), The Sky Pilot (1899), The Man from Glengarry (1901), The Doctor (1906), The Foreigner (1909, British edition: The Settler), Corporal Cameron (1912), and To Him That Hath (1921).5 My conclusion after reading these novels is that Gordon’s views on success are very similar to his American counterparts, though not exactly identical. A number of themes common to success novels from the United States appear in the Connor novels, and in many cases there are no real differences. At several points, though, the Connor novels develop themes in ways that reflect differences between the United States and Anglophone Canadian culture. The most basic of the themes shared is the fundamental assumption that success is a matter of personal character and that the person with a strong, virtuous character will be more successful than the person of weak character. This assumption forms the bedrock of all seven novels and each novel is something of a long illustration of the point. Black Rock is the story of the reform and renewal of a mining and lumbering community in the Selkirk Mountains. The local Presbyterian minister and his allies wage a long and eventually successful campaign against demon rum and bring both sobriety and culture to the miners and loggers of Black Rock. There is a crisis created by the two weak characters of the local saloon owner and doctor. Because of the strength of character of the minister and Mrs. Mavor, the doctor gives up drink and the saloon is converted to a coffee house. The novel illustrates the point made in the preface: “The men of the book are still there in the mines and lumber camps of the mountains, fighting out that eternal fight for manhood, strong, clean, God-conquered.”6 If this particular novel reads like a temperance or evangelistic tract, it is because the original purpose of the short stories on which it was based was to encourage Presbyterians in the East to give money in support of missions in the West.