The 1908 Winnipeg General Assembly:

The Call To Make Canada Christian

 

A Donald MacLeod, Research Professor, Tyndale Theological Seminary, Toronto

 

A paper presented to the Canadian Society of Presbyterian History

27 September, 2008

 

 

 

            Somewhere, in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, the Presbyterian Church in Canada changed course. Six key leaders that had shaped the first quarter century after the union of 1875 were gone in short order: four leading academics still leading their institutions: George Bryce of Manitoba College in 1899, Daniel MacVicar of Presbyterian College in 1901, George Grant of Queens a year later, and William Caven of Knox College in 1904. And R H Warden, general agent of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, who briefly succeeded Caven as chair of the Church Union committee, died shortly after. And arguably the greatest of them all, Superintendent of Western Missions James Robertson, had gone suddenly while at his desk in January of 1902.

            Without an obvious succession, the future of the denomination was up for grabs. New voices were being heard, imported leaders, or those who had taken their training outside the country. And, in spite of numerical strength, new imposing edifices, and theological colleges full of eager young recruits, each made possible by an inheritance from the past, there were seismic changes taking place in the Presbyterian Church in Canada in theology, mission, and ministry. By focussing on the General Assembly of 1908, and in my case highlighting the moderator Frederic DuVal, and in David Marshall’s Charles Gordon, both Winnipeg clergy, a new understanding of church union and indeed the broader development of Protestantism in Twentieth Century Canada may emerge. And, one hundred years later, with a greatly reduced standing in a post-Christendom age, how the church responds to societal and theological change.

 

            On the evening of Wednesday, 3 June 1908, the thirty-fourth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church was convened in Knox Church, Winnipeg. It was the third General Assembly to meet in what was described as “the gateway of the Golden West.” On the first occasion, in 1887, Jonathan Goforth and Fraser Smith, from Knox and Queen’s respectively, were appointed to be the first missionaries of the Canadian church to China. Ten years later, in 1897, the Assembly returned to Winnipeg, with home missions sharing the honours, with guests  McQueen of Edmonton and McKillop of Lethbridge, alongside  John Buchanan and Norman Russell of India and MacKenzie of Honan.

            Eleven years later the third assembly to meet in Winnipeg had a strong missionary theme as well, but this time home and overseas came together in a vision of a Christian Canada that would be a powerhouse in bringing Christian civilization to the world. It was a heady time: Canada was booming: Alberta and Saskatchewan had become provinces two years earlier, and the census two years later would confirm that the Presbyterian Church had surpassed the Methodists and Anglicans as the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. During the previous five years Winnipeg had grown from 70,000 to 118,000 in population. There were now seven Presbyterian congregations, “well manned ... centres of influence making for the better life of the city and indeed of the whole country. Let Winnipeg flourish by the preaching of the word!” was the breathless prose describing the Assembly in The Presbyterian^[1].

            Robert Campbell, for twenty-nine years clerk of the General Assembly, was euphoric in his report as retiring moderator, telling commissioners that there had been “advance nearly all along the line” referring specifically to the impact of the Student Volunteer Movement and the Laymen’s Missionary Movement.”^[2] Reports from the Korea Mission  had been circulating about a remarkable revival there. And Winnipeg itself had recently been at the centre of innovative and effective outreach^[3]. For five weeks the previous October and November J Wilbur Chapman (1859-1918), the American Presbyterian evangelist, had brought his road show to the city. Winnipeg had been divided into six sections and meetings were held in a representative church in each area. Three of the six were Presbyterian. Over 80,000 had attended.. As a result, Chapman was invited to share his evangelistic vision to the 1908 General Assembly as a special guest of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

            But there was a new voice being heard. 1908 was the year Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and The Social Crisis was published by Macmillan. Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), whose passion was the “social gospel”, asked:

“Will some Gibbon of Mongol race sit by the shore of the Pacific in the year A.D. 3000 and write on the ‘Decline and Fall of the Christian Empire’? If so, he will probably describe the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the golden age when outwardly life flourished as never before, but when that decay, which resulted in the gradual collapse of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, was already far advanced. Or will the twentieth century mark for the future historian the real adolescence of humanity, the great emancipation from barbarism and from the paralysis of injustice, and the beginning of a progress in the intellectual, social, and moral life of mankind to which all past history has no parallel ? It will depend almost wholly on the moral forces which the Christian nations can bring to the fighting line against wrong, and the fighting energy of those moral forces will again depend on the degree to which they are inspired by religious faith and enthusiasm. It is either a revival of social religion or the deluge.”^[4]

Referring specifically to Canada, David B Marshall writes:  “It was thought that if the churches preached a social gospel, based on the example of the Sermon on the Mount, which offered hope, then once again the ‘common people’ would flock to hear the Christian message.”^[5] .

 

            As central Ontario commissioners left Union Station Toronto in late May 1908, to be joined by others from Quebec and the Maritimes at North Bay station, the railway coaches were full of war stories and good humour.  The Assembly was to take up the challenge of the hour, confident in the assurance that Canada would not only be a Christian nation, but would also be instrumental in ensuring the Christianization of the entire planet. “It was good,” one journalist present reported, “to grasp the hands of these men who are laying the foundation of empire and shaping the future destiny of this great land of promise.” ^[6]  Or in the words of the Moderator, Frederic DuVal, in forgettable poetry that greeted arriving commissioners:

            “You gather to the middle west,

            The heart of Canada the blest;

            The land by God’s good bounty fed

            Upon the sweetest of His bread ...

            That through your wisdom, faith, and love,

            And gracious favor (sic) from above,

            The Church may strive with heart and hand

            To plant the church in every land.”^[7]

 

            No one represented the spirit of 1908 Canadian Presbyterianism better than Frederic Beale DuVal (1847-1928).Born in Bladensburg Maryland of Huguenot stock, orphaned at an early age^[8], compelled to support himself by clerking in Washington DC, he left a promising business career to prepare for ordained ministry. He had professed faith at the age of 12 in the local Methodist church but he chose to be mentored by a Presbyterian minister^[9] in Hightstown, NJ, who prepared him for entry to Princeton University, where he graduated with gold medals for oratory and debate in 1872, taking a master’s in 1875. His arrival at the college coincided with that of James McCosh (1811-1894) from Scotland. He attended McCosh’s Bible class for his four years at Princeton College and received first prize in Biblical scholarship on graduation. The remarkable Arnold Guyot (1807-1884), Professor of Geology and Physical Geography, had great influence on DuVal: “He wove truth into the warp and woof of practical life,” he was later to say^[10]. Guyot, a devout Swiss scientist, also lectured at the seminary on the “connection between revealed religion and metaphysical science.”^[11] The impact of Guyot was lifelong. As Professor F W Kerr, minister of Knox Winnipeg from 1924 - 1932, said in DuVal’s funeral eulogy: “From his early manhood, he interpreted the relation between science and religion, so that none of his people were ever perturbed by the bugbear of evolution or biblical criticism.”^[12] In later years there is a single reference in DuVal’s papers to Princeton Seminary’s Charles Hodge^[13] but by then Hodge was already in his mid-seventies and infirm. Eight of the thirty-one graduates of the Princeton Seminary class of 1875 were from Canada^[14]. It was noted at the time of his election as moderator of General Assembly that “[DuVal] is a Princeton man, sound in the faith as a Princeton man should be, and tolerant, as some of them are not.”^[15] Until its reorganization in 1929, and in spite of the fact that the iconic James Robertson (first minister at Knox Winnipeg) had spent two formative years there, Princeton Seminary received mixed reviews in the Canadian church.

            On graduation, DuVal accepted a call to First Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware. Later that same year he was married to Corinne Kearfoot, from a well-connected Philadelphia Episcopal family. In Wilmington a pattern for ministry developed: “messages adapted to carry conviction to the hearer, because of the intensity of the conviction of the speaker. He is of a strongly sympathetic nature, and this combined with a love of what is pure and good, and a hatred of cruelty, deception and fraud, has borne fruit in his efforts to inculcate greater regard for the moral in education, and to foster the work of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Animals, and the arrest of fraud and vice by instruction of the masses in their relative duties.”^[16]

            In February 1884 DuVal was called to Westminster Church, Toledo, Ohio. Iin spite of the Toledo Daily Blade’s account of his time there as a “long pastorate” (a disillusioned parishioner, perhaps?), it was a short ministry. “Few ministers,” the local paper opined when he left four years later, “have been able during this same period, to win as strong a hold on the esteem and confidence of their people as has Dr DuVal^[17] in Toledo.... At the same time his Toledo friends are glad to know of the exceptionally promising field of labor to which he has been called, not doubting his success.”^[18] In his opening sermon at Knox Winnipeg on 5 August 1888 he described a conversation he had had with an editor and historian at his final midweek prayer meeting in Toledo, looking on the call to Canada as “one of the most blessed signs that the spirit of the gospel of Jesus Christ was working in the world” and that there was “free trade in the gospel.”^[19]

            It was a difficult time in Manitoba. The Riel Rebellion was still a powerful memory^[20]. The economy had tanked, leaving Knox Church with a substantial debt on its new building^[21]. But DuVal had a vision: “they occupied here a very important field. Winnipeg is a centre of commercial, intellectual and moral influence. Churches and colleges have been planted that in the time to come would mould the growing mind of the Northwest. Therefore let this church undertake its work with the idea that God has given it a high commission and it is to act through perfect organization, mutual confidence and above all faith in God.”^[22]

            From the commencement of his ministry in Winnipeg DuVal demonstrated that he was prepared to do battle on every social issue of the time. Described by the ever flamboyant journalist James Henry Gray as a “pint-sized zealot with hard gleaming eye and luxuriant chin whiskers”^[23] DuVal made many enemies in his social crusades. He started with an attack on separate schools for Roman Catholics as guaranteed by the Manitoba Act of 1870, weighing in on the Manitoba Schools Question, and siding with Thomas Greenway (1838 - 1909), then premier of Manitoba. Aligning himself with those who thought that Manitoba should be Protestant and British, he insisted that he was not anti-Catholic. As an American he had little understanding of the language issue, it would appear.

            No social issue missed his eagle eye: Sunday observance was one of his concerns, arguing in its defence that “the body politic must pick out what is right and good and proper to be done, and make the law regulative of all.”^[24] Booze and brothels both he considered to be his mandate. He was outspokenly in favour of Prohibition (which brought him close to the Methodists). On 12 January 1908 he preached a barnstormer against a proposal “to extend the hours for sale in the barrooms of Winnipeg.”^[25] The Presbyterian picked up the matter, noting that the sermon had been widely quoted in the Winnipeg papers, saying it would be glad to print extracts, and beginning its campaign to have him elected as Moderator.

            But it was for his opposition to legalized prostitution that he is now best known. He was opposed to a red light district: “Segregation does not desegregate, regulation does not regulate,” he thundered^[26] In 1903 his agitation led to the mayor of Winnipeg, John Arbuthnot, withdrawing from a forthcoming election. Thomas Sharpe, DuVal’s alternative, came in by acclamation and started a cleanup. DuVal’s single publication The Problem of Social Vice in Winnipeg appeared in 1910, rebutting an Anglican minister’s defence of brothel segregation, calling it an “unwarranted assumption”. He became emotional: “to surrender the highest hopes of our latest edition of Christian civilization to the blight of a vice that has shamefully destroyed so many older nations, in the name of holy life, and of the God of life: NEVER! I know that every step of this world’s improvement has been taken through field of trial, and often blood.”^[27] And so finally: “Respect for self, the sanctity of the marriage tie, the honor of home, the zeal for your children’s future good, the love of country and the hope of founding the noblest edition of national life to be an ensample to the world, must engage your determination that such a prospective bloom shall not be foully blighted in the bud.”^[28]

            This image of feisty Frederic DuVal fighting vice at city hall is in sharp contrast to the populist figure he projected as the moderator of the thirty-fourth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. “Twenty-seven presbyteries nominated me and the Assembly chose me by acclamation and with enthusiasm, the kind things reflect honor on Princeton,” he wrote Joseph Heatly Dulles, long-time librarian at the Seminary^[29] as he enclosed a variety of press clippings. “The meeting was well generalled,” it was reported in The Presbyterian at the conclusion of Assembly, “and Moderator DuVal, by his unfailing courtesy, his firmness and alertness, his familiarity with the rules of ecclesiastical procedure, and his even-handed justice, fully realized the expectations of those who believed he would prove a worthy successor of the honored men who had preceded him.”^[30] Or, in the words of Professor Cappon of Queen’s, “Throughout the proceedings, the personality of the Moderator, the Rev Dr DuVal of Winnipeg, was felt, controlling procedure and discussion in a decisive and pleasantly firm way.”^[31]

            As Moderator DuVal had to remain silent as various issues close to his heart were discussed. Education was always a matter of deep concern to DuVal, typified by the debate over a proposal to separate Queens from the denomination. The Principal of Queens, Daniel Miner Gordon, was arguing strenuously for such a move. Gordon was DuVal’s predecessor at Knox Church, Winnipeg.  DuVal had been appointed in 1901 a member of the Council of the University of Manitoba. His great interest however was Manitoba College, which he served for twenty-seven years as a member of its Board of Management (1899 to 1926) as well as being on its Senate.

            Manitoba College enjoyed a close relationship to Knox Church Winnipeg. George Bryce^[32] had been sent west by the Canada Presbyterian Church, founding a post-secondary school in Kildonan in October 1871. The following January he presented a petition to presbytery for the erection of a new congregation, named Knox. He became its first minister and moderator of Session until James Robertson was called from Delhi, Ontario, two years later. From that time, until his death, he took an active part in the life of Knox Church and was instrumental in the call from Toledo of Frederic DuVal.

            Manitoba College always occupied a unique role in Canadian Presbyterian theological education, serving as a continual reminder of the frontier and the need to Christianize the prairies. At the Assembly of 1908 it was reported that of a total enrollment of 275, 18 were in regular theology, but 25 more in the minister evangelist course. It was said in 1900 that the College occupied a more important place in the “better life of the vast empire west of the Great Lakes than the Premier of the Province or the Governor of the Territories.”^[33] James Robertson taught there while at Knox Church and as superintendent was a major advocate. “The Superintendent preaches on Manitoba College and takes up a collection for Home Missions,” it was reported.^[34] John Mark King arrived as Principal in 1883, the year he was moderator of General Assembly. He established a familiar pattern, being involved in a variety of civic causes. His daughter Helen married Charles Gordon. His sudden death on 5 March 1899 created a challenge for someone to fill his substantial shoes and maintain the unique ethos of the College.

            To what extent Frederic DuVal bears responsibility for the appointment of William Patrick as the new Principal of Manitoba College in 1900 is not clear. Patrick, as Keith Clifford substantiates in his The Resistance to Church Union in Canada^[35], played a pivotal role in the church union debate.  The appointment of William Patrick was regarded as a major coup for the colonial college: he had strong intellectual credentials and close friendships with the progressive wing of the Free Church of Scotland which had just united with the United Presbyterian Church. This rather austere bachelor, with few close friends and little knowledge of Canada, has been described by Clifford as “the first liberal to be placed in a position of authority” in the Presbyterian Church in Canada . His inaugural lecture on 17 April 1900 on “The Person of Christ” spoke of “Christ as the crown of the moral ideal ... the start of a new evolution.”^[36]

            In September of 1902 the General Conference of the Methodist Church^[37] met in Winnipeg. George Bryce (then Moderator of General Assembly), Charles Gordon, and William Patrick were appointed to bring fraternal greetings. Bryce addressed common social issues, Gordon spoke of a common calling to fight materialism, but Patrick called for a great national church. The Methodists, whose numbers (in 1900 census figures, just released) and self-confidence were in evident decline, responded with enthusiasm. Thus was set in motion twenty-three years of fractious debate and eventual schism.

            In the various significant milestones leading to 1925, the 1908 General Assembly does not play a prominent role. But it was clear where the Moderator stood on the issue. Having himself professed faith in the Bladensburg Methodist church at the age of twelve, married to an Episcopalian, his interests were ecumenical. But his temperance and anti-vice crusades had also aligned him with other like-minded Protestants. In his retiring sermon as moderator, read (because he was unable to be present owing to his wife’s funeral) to the 1909 Assembly meeting in Central Church Hamilton, he stated: “Men are struggling to free themselves from ills they cannot clearly define. These demands will not be met by the reiteration of dry dogmas. The system of public education has taught our children to reason.” And he concluded: “Instead of childish rivalries, the world is demanding a Church full of zeal for the amelioration of human conditions. Instead of bolstering these petty rivalries by gathering up scores of incompetent men to hold contested field, the world is asking to send men deeply cultured in all truth, and competent to lead into amelioration. We are only trifling with the mighty problems that burdened the heart of the Son of God.”^[38]

 

            As already noted, J Wilbur Chapman (1859-1918)^[39], protegé of Dwight L Moody, was invited to speak, providing a contrasting theological approach to the “amelioration” of society. He shared with the Assembly how, after a slump,  the American church had grown in the past seven years as a result of the formation of a denominational Evangelistic Committee. As its secretary, he urged a similar committee be formed in Canada. “The central message of all true preaching is the crucified and the risen Christ. There is no story that will touch and move the hearts of men like the story of the Christ ... without Christ a man is lost. If there were a thousand ways that men could be saved there would not be much need of preaching. There are not a thousand ways - there is but one way, and we are responsible for making that way known. Let every minister have the burden of souls laid upon his heart and the whole Presbyterian Church will be aflame.”^[40] At the request of Assembly, Charles Gordon met with Chapman and the chair of the American committee for consultation and possible implementation of Assembly’s expressed interest in Chapmen and would himself briefly join the Chapman team in Philadelphia.

 

            DuVal was asked by General Assembly, in addition to representing the Canadian church at Geneva at the four hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth, to speak at the Quebec Tercentenary. His sermon, given at St Andrew’s Quebec in the presence of Governor General Earl Grey, provided an opportunity for DuVall to highlight his Huguenot, American and now immigrant Canadian heritage. Grey had turned the event into what became a celebration of the Anglophone hegemony involving the Prince of Wales, the British Atlantic fleet, along with American and French vessels. Francophone and nationalist Quebeckers were not amused.

            In perhaps his most insightful recorded sermon DuVal gave out as his text Isaiah 43:19: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.” This he applied, with a curious hermeneutic, to the colonization of the New World: “God had in mind a forward step in the higher well-being of the race.” “A new way in the arena of human development was necessary, even though it had to be opened in the wilderness,” he continued. “It is of great significance that twelve years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, here at the base of this old natural citadel, the French forefathers, representing a more peaceful spirit than that which drenched the homeland with such noble blood, anchored their little ships at the gateway of the new world, and inspired with new sentiments and new hopes, broke their bread together in the peace of God. It is something worth gathering to celebrate,. And something worthier still if we can make it a stronger bond of Christian fraternity, to bless the land in which we live with increasing light and redeeming love.” And he concluded: “May this significant gathering in Quebec, prove to be the seal and security of the fact that the settlement effected here, was a forward movement of Divine Providence toward the highest well-being of the race.”^[41]

            Frederic DuVal retired in 1916 after twenty-eight years in the pastorate of Knox Church. At a meeting of the joint boards in December 1915, a resolution was passed, signed by George Bryce as chair, speaking of him as “A faithful and self-denying pastor, Dr DuVal has been a famous ‘preacher of righteousness’ and has never failed to denounce evil, in personal, social, civic, political, or national life.”^[42] His highest achievement, it was stated, was the moderatorship of the 1908 General Assembly. He lived to see the foundation of a new Knox Church Winnipeg being laid, then the building stopped, as the toll of World War I increased. He lost one of his own sons in the conflict. The Presbyterian Church in Canada went on to go through the turmoils of separation and division. He died suddenly on the steps of his Winnipeg home on 15 May 1928, just a fortnight before his 81^st birthday. “The funeral of Dr DuVal was one of the largest witnessed in this city,” the Winnipeg Free Press reported.^[43]

           

            By that point, the dream of a Christianized Canada was rapidly receding, lost in the trenches of France, facing increasingly secularization, and the devastating turmoil of the church union crisis with its impact on a bewildered population bemused by how much so-called unity could be bought at the price of terrible disunity and bitterness. The impact of the theological liberalism that, in spite of his Princeton theological education, DuVal espoused, would only become apparent in later years. A foundation, set up in his name in the 1930s has kept a dwindling Knox church at the heart of Winnipeg with significant ministries to the homeless and the disadvantaged, something that would (one suspects) please him.

           

            A Christian Canada is no longer a realistic expectation. Indeed the question at times seems  to be whether Christianity will survive in Canada at all. The vision of 1908 appears in hindsight hollow and shallow, the product of an illusory phantasm of wishful thinking, a totally unrealistic view of human nature, and a complete misapprehension of what the church should be all about. In its stead, one hopes, there is today a greater realism about historic processes, a denial of the racial and cultural pride that gave their vision birth, and a commitment to good news not encumbered by triumphalism.

             At the same time, there is something grand and energizing about their desire to reach their generation for Christ. Stripped of its ethnocentric pride, perhaps we could learn something from their self-confident and visionary commitment. The 1908 General Assembly represented a highwater mark of establishment (Constantinian) Canadian Presbyterian identity. We have come a long, and torturous way since then but perhaps, looking back we can understand ourselves today and have a clearer focus as to where we should be going.