Since the late eighteenth century, many Canadian Baptists have had sharply divergent views of the efficacy of higher education. For some, higher education has been viewed as the worldly means whereby pristine evangelical piety is savagely undermined. And for others, higher education – as one Baptist educator put it in 1883 – was the only way true evangelicals could effectively “meet the polished shafts of a refined and subtle infidelity.”¹ The ongoing Baptist debate concerning Christian higher education has significantly shaped the contours of the Canadian Baptist experience for almost two centuries. And it continues to do so even in...

On a warm August evening in 1888 in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, students, faculty, politicians and friends gathered in Assembly Hall, Acadia College, to celebrate that institution’s golden jubilee. Nearly 2,000 people crowded the building in what the HalifaxHeraldcalled “the grandest gathering that ever took place west of Halifax.”¹ The paper further enthused: “The wealth and brains, the youth and beauty, and the strength and manhood of the denomination were assembled.”² The building was suitably decorated with plants and flowers, spruce boughs and Chinese lanterns. And mounted high on the wall was the biblical text “Hitherto the Lord hath...

The granting of McMaster University’s charter in 1887 was both a new beginning and a culmination “of Baptist educational ventures that reached far back into pre-Confederation Canada.”¹ The McMaster of 1887, in other words, was as Professor Charles Johnston has persuasively argued, made up of historical segments from the Canada Baptist College in Montreal, the Canadian Literary Institute in Woodstock, and the Toronto Baptist College and Moulton College of Toronto. But, of course, McMaster University was also much more than this. It was also the creation of Senator William McMaster, a native of Tyrone County, Ireland, who had by the...

In June 1857, the cornerstone of the Canadian Literary Institute was laid in Woodstock, Ontario, an occasion hailed by the Grand River North Baptist Association the following year because “the progress of science and the march of intellect demands that we keep pace with the times we live in if we are not to be left behind.”¹ Similarly, at the annual meetings of the Baptist Home Mission Convention of Manitoba and the North-West in 1883, in the presence of Professor Malcolm MacVicar of McMaster Hall, Toronto, and representatives of the American Baptist Publication Society, the fledgling Baptist denomination on the...

In the early hours of 16 July 1925, two young men were sleeping fitfully just inside the main door of the Ross Memorial Hospital, in Lindsay, Ontario. The hospital staff had thoughtfully provided two small cots so that the men could rest, but their anxiety was such that proper sleep was impossible. One of them was a professor of English from Wesley College, Winnipeg; he had returned to his native region for a holiday. At about noon on the previous day his wife, the former Isabel Peel, had given birth to twin boys. The babies were fairly healthy, but she...