Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College, The

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2004 by Hayes, Alan L

The Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College. By William Westfall. McGill-Queens Studies in the History of Religion. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. xiv 160 pp. CDN$49.95 (cloth); US$49.95 (cloth).

Trinity College, Toronto, was founded in 1851 as the official Anglican alternative to the "godless" new University of Toronto. Everyone recognized the irony when in 1904 Trinity federated with its former nemesis. Clearly there is a story to be told here, hut until now no one has done justice to it. In part, the problem has been that the histories of institutions are usually told by their advocates. Historians of Trinity painted the founders as heroic and visionary, and overlooked their shortcomings. Historians of the University of Toronto pictured the denominational schools, before they joined the public system, as outlying curiosities unworthy of serious attention. If only because this book by William Westfall, a professor of history at York University, rises above these constraints, its treatment of the first years of Trinity College is welcome.

But the book achieves far more than a better interpretation of the early years of a very small school in a distant part of the British Empire. It is a brilliant monograph which demonstrates the profound linkages between the origins of Trinity College and wider, deeper currents of history. Westfall shows that the founding of Trinity represents a milestone in the religious, educational, social, and constitutional history oi Canada. The author has an extraordinary ability to draw our attention to some small particular-a ceremonial procession, the architectural features of a building, a bishop's public statement-and use it to open up broad historical vistas. As a result, the reader is likely to experience unexpected illumination on almost every page.

The older, narrower view of Trinity's origins was created by its chief founder, John Strachan, the bishop of Toronto. Speaking at the laying of the comei-stone of the first building in 1851, Strachan constructed a myth of origins for the college which, for decades afterwards, would be retold at its public events, in its official documents, and in its books of historical remembrance. he pictured Trinity as the heroic response of the Church of England in Canada to a radical and irreligious government which had jettisoned traditional values of education in favor of a secularising public university. Trinity would train the country's future civic leaders and professionals in the venerable moral and academic values of English Christianity. This founding myth, Westfall argues, was an exercise in "creative misdirection." Claiming to protect tradition from radicalism, Strachan prevented his audience from seeing how dramatically he himself was changing colonial Anglicanism. Formerly he had fashioned the Church of England as the common public religion of the province, administering higher education without denominational tests; now the church was seceding from public education, and requiring its teachers and students to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. And what did lie mean by claiming that Trinity was Anglican? Most Anglican lay leaders supported the public university, not Trinity.

For its first thirty years, Trinity was largely a failure. Enrollments were dismally small. Financial deficits were chronic. The curriculum was modeled on the "clerical and unreformed" Cambridge which the first provost, George Whitaker, had attended in the 183Os. The governance and discipline reflected the aristocratic households of the previous century. A "strongly monastic air" hung about the fenced compound.

The second provost, Charles Body, arrived in 1881, and soon rejected most of Strachan and Whitaker's vision for Trinity. he transformed the governance, curriculum, and community life of the college, and improved relations with lay Anglicans, the University of Toronto, and the government. His arrival was the real founding moment for the Trinity College which we know today, with a well-earned reputation for academic excellence, public service, and ideological diversity.

ALAN L. HAYES

Wycliffe College

Toronto School of Theology

Toronto, Ontario