McMaster University 1/The Toronto Years by Charles M. Johnston (review)

466 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 quote Leavis quoting Eliot in this context?] of true judgment.' In his original 'Conclusion' Frye raised the possibility of 'another book: A Litel"G/'Y Criticism of Cal1ada' (II, 358). That, I suppose, is what I am asking for, and it is what Smith was asking for in his original review, which concluded as follows: 'What is needed now is a comprehensive "critical history" by a single author who can combine scholarly research with imaginative interpretation and who has enough faith in the literary quality of the best work drawn from all kinds of writing ... to make evaluation his first business and let the chips fall where they may.' For all their limitations, the volumes under review can at least be said to have cleared the ground for this necessary undertaking. (w.J. KEITH) Charles M. Johnston. McMaster University l iThe Toronto Years. University of Toronto Press. xvi, 295, illus. $15.00 In recent years the study of higher education in Canada has acquired a scope and a scholarly depth never achieved or, indeed, aspired to before. Now with the publication of Robin S. Harris's A HistOl'Y of Higher Education in Canada 1663 -1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press "976), the field has been incisively delineated; major themes and developments have been established that will be confirmed or modified by subsequent volumes devoted to specific subjects. Chief among them will be institutional histories that, in most cases, can build upon earlier publications of industrious and devoted alumni. Charles Johnston, Professor of History at McMaster University, has written the first volume of one of these new histories, and it is an exemplary study. Johnston pursues a major theme - the emergence from the tangled roots of sectarianism of a university that recognized a responsibility for teaching and research in all the major disciplines. In an essential respect the Baptists were unlikely proponents of the university idea; there was a strong tendency within the faith to keep religion and secular instruction apart, and to rely upon the state for the latter. But gradually the idea triumphed of combining theological instruction within a university that taught secular subjects in an atmosphere of Christian dedication. McMaster University was created in 1887 by the union of Toronto Bible College, a Baptist seminary, and Woodstock College, a Baptist school devoted to general education. But it was for several decades a troubled union, constantly under attack by fundamentalists who perceived in the university a threat both to the traditional theology and to sound moral instruction. The university found it necessary to emphasize its evangelical mission. When the decision was made to transfer to Hamilton in the early twenties, Chancellor Whidden wrote that the university would become 'an increasingly productive missionary enterprise within the life HUMANITIES 467 of the denomination ... and an increasingly effective instrument for the building of the Kingdom and leavening of the nation.' Johnston must concern himself with long and protracted theological disputations, and elaborate offensive and defensive campaigns conducted by the university authorities and the forces of fundamentalism. Much of this today seems trivial and tedious, but Johnston enlivens the account with vivid portraits - of, for instance,Senator McMaster, whose benefaction of $9"0,000 to the infant university, a huge sum for the day, casts doubts on the common declaration that Canadian wealth, unlike American, was unresponsive to the needs of universities; of the Reverend Thomas Todhunter Shields, the leaderof the extreme fundamentalists , who emerges as the redoubtable and implacable foe of the McMaster idea; and of a gallery of chancellors and academics, of whom Howard Whidden is the most vividly portrayed. To an emphasis on individuals Johnston adds an historian's awareness of a larger context. Thus the move of the centre of Baptist education from Montreal to Woodstock and then to Toronto is seen as a process of Americanization by which Canadian Baptists became part of the American religiOUS scene. (An offshoot of this is the movement of McMaster graduate students - Harold Innis is the most famous example - to the University of Chicago, which had begun as a Baptist institution, but rapidly acquired a reputation for worldly modernism.) As a result McMaster developed in 'the...