Our Debt to Northern Ontario

MR. HUMPHREYS: Your Grace, Distinguished Guests, Gentlemen of The Empire Club: More than a hundred years ago, St. John's Church, York Mills, was established. Soon afterwards the Clergy of that church were asked to commence a mission a few miles to the south. That mission became St. Paul's Church, Bloor Street, Toronto. Apart from the famous cathedral in London, St. Paul's Church, Toronto, is said to be the largest St. Paul's Church in the Empire.

Our guest today is the Right Reverend Robert I. Renison, M.A., D.D., who has been Rector of St. Paul's Church here in Toronto for nearly eleven years.

It is with mixed feelings we greet our fellow-member and guest of honour today, for in January he relinquishes his work here to respond to the honour bestowed upon him by the Synod of Moosonee, when in August last he was elected Bishop of the Diocese of Moosonee. The fitness of things is some compensation to us and to his congregation for the loss we shall sustain, for most of you know that Bishop Renison is an authority on Canadian-Indian language and lore and he is the author of A Hymn Book in the Cree Language. Another of his books is Canada At War, 191¢-18.

Bishop Renison was born in Ireland and came to Canada in 1881, at the age of six. He was educated at Trinity College School, Port Hope, where he distinguished himself by becoming head boy. Later he attended Wycliffe College here in Toronto. As a missionary, he went to Moose Fort and Albany, and later was Curate of the Church of the Messiah in Toronto. Then in 1907 he was appointed Arch-Deacon of Moosonee. He was also Rector of the Church of the Ascension at Hamilton and afterwards appointed Arch-Deacon of Wellington, and also Arch-Deacon of Hamilton.

Then Bishop Renison went to Western Canada, where he was Rector of Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver, and in 1929 was appointed Dean of New Westminster. In 1931 he was elected Bishop of Athabaska, afterwards returning to Toronto to become Rector of St. Paul's Church.

Bishop Renison was Honorary Chaplain of the 86th Battalion, C.E.F., and Chaplain and Honorary Captain of the 4th Infantry Brigade, 2nd Canadian Division, B.E.F. It is interesting to note that Bishop Renison recruited a Company of Indians for the Forestry Battalion which saw service in France and Belgium in 1917-19.

Our guest holds the King's Jubilee Medal of 1935, and is Honorary Wing Commander, Royal Canadian Air Force. Degrees have been conferred upon him by the Universities of Toronto, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and he is a 32nd Degree Scottish Rite Mason.

My Lord, Bishop Renison, please address the members of your Club on the subject, "Our Debt to Northern Ontario". (Applause.)

RT. REV. R. I. RENISON, M.A., D.D.: Mr. Chairman, Your Grace, and Fellow Members of The Empire Club It is a great pleasure and it is an honour to be allowed to speak to you on the subject that should seem as remote to you as the story of the moon. Moosonee is only a name to the average Canadian.

I would like to begin today by saying that Moosonee was the first capital of what is now Canada. Speaking from the spiritually prophetic point of view, long before the first Empire Loyalist travelled across the ice of the St. Lawrence to the Bay of Quinte, long before the British settlements were established in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, there were some British folk that flew the flag of England in the first Ontario seaport in the year 1670.

Just a word about how that happened: In some extraordinary way the people of the British Isles came to the full consciousness of their destiny in the days of Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century. Not very long before that time America had been discovered and it came as a shock to the men of Devon and Cornwall to learn that the Spanish had actually discovered America through Christopher Columbus, and to make things worse than that the Portuguese Empire, under Henry, the Navigator, had drifted away down the African Coast around the Cape of Good Hope until they had reached India, and the result was that somebody else except the Lord's Annointed had found the way to the rich and storied parts of the world, and I think they came to a perfectly logical conclusion, that if there was a God in his Heaven, there must be a pathway that would lead the British sailor to the land of his desire, a northwest passage, and so that illusion, that strange pipe-dream of the British race, existed for 250 years.

Henry Hudson's three voyages were the beginning of the story. He discovered Hudson Bay and it was 70 years afterward that a little sailing vessel came down from the Straits and they landed at Moose Factory and began the British settlement of Canada.

Without going into Canadian history, I want to say that after 250 years when it came to pass in the strange, mysterious agency of Providence that the Dominion of Canada was to be formed, that old company which began at Moose Fort, which the Indians called Moosonee, was able to contribute 1,500,000 square miles, or one half of the area of this Dominion of Canada. There had been people there for more than two and a half centuries. I admit that those who went up in the early days were looking for banana trees. They were looking for jewels and gold, such as the Spaniards found in Mexico and Peru, but that is not the way that God leads his people.

They died, they suffered, they buried their dead and they gradually spread over Northern Canada, and I want to give you just one little personal story.

I went down to Moosonee in a birch bark canoe in the year 1898. In those days that land which was the "twilight land" of the Hudson's Bay Company regime, had nothing to do with Canada. They never spoke of Canada. All their communications with the Old Country were a ship that came once a year through Hudson Strait. I remember that for more than ten years that was the story. The Dominion Government in those days had, no consciousness, apparently, that there was such a place as Moosonee or that there were any people living there at all, but they awakened to their opportunity in the year 1905, and I remember that I had the wonderful opportunity of living in Albany when the first representative of the Canadian Government landed there to make a Treaty with the Indians. I remember the old Chief, Solomon. He stood there, looking like a refugee prince as he confronted the great representative of the King. As a matter of fact, the representative of the King was an Alderman and a very worthy friend of mine from Toronto. He may be listening today. And I remember, because he was a very large man, well padded, so to speak, the Indians thought he must be a very great prince. I remember, when he said to the Indians, "You know, the white man loves his Indian brother", old Solomon looked him in the eye and said, "Yes, he loves the very ground he walks on."

The first Treaty was made in the year 1905, and then we began to get civilized. I remember in the year 1908 I came up on snowshoes from Moose Factory in the winter, in February, to a place where Cochrane now stands. There was just a rumour that people were beginning to move into the southern part of Northern Ontario. I can remember now the wonderful experience of coming out, night after night, 40 below zero, and coming, leaner and leaner, toward the land of fatness, and I can remember the wonderful experience of coming into a surveyor's camp one night when it must have been nearly 50 below zero and they gave us the best bed in the place. Northern hospitality. We slept late next morning and I went down with my Indian guide into the dining room and there was a bacon and eggs breakfast-a whole dozen eggs with bacon to match. We were as lean as greyhounds, and I wondered at the technique of the Indian who had never seen such things before. He knew what to do with the bacon, but as far as the eggs were concerned, after each piece of bacon he took gracefully a fried egg on the end of his knife and swallowed one after another until he consumed seven. I had the rest.

Those were the days when people who had been doing missionary work up there for 75 years came down to meet the coming of the glory of civilization. I can re member now the days of the camps when I waded through the old swamps toward Porcupine Lake, where Hollinger now is, and the way in which at the old Kelso House, they had a hotel which gave a bed to a man for six hours and then he had to clear out and while the bed was warm his successor lay down to sleep. But today that part of the country has become an important place.

Well, the first debt that we owe to Northern Ontario is the debt of history. They discovered us rather than we discovered them.

I want to say just a word to you about the forests of that north land. Man is the great enemy. I believe that although man considers himself the most Divine being created by the Almighty, if it came to a vote among all the living things in the world and it was an honest and uncontrolled vote, I am not quite sure that man wouldn't be branded as Enemy Number 1, because he has an extraordinary faculty of destroying all the living things of Nature.

Now, I am one of those who believes in the mysticism of the forest. No one has ever been able to travel through the forest in that northern land without a sense that it is alive. You may say that the northern forests are not to be compared with the great historic forests of the world.

It is quite true. Out in British Columbia there are the Douglas Firs and the great cedars that stretch up 250 feet, but you know they are the aristocrats of the world of trees, and they need the protection of under-brush in order to keep standing. They have no tap roots that go down into the ground and there are so few of them that they can't do very much to make this world a better place, but I think there is a parable in the fact that in these great northern forests it is the little jack-pine, it is the spruce, it is the tamarack and the balsam, it is the poplar and the birch that do the things that make much of the glory of our modern civilization possible.

Man has an extraordinary faculty for destroying trees, not only by cutting them down and turning them in his will, but in burning them down in the most senseless, diabolical manner. Have you ever seen a forest fire? One of the tragedies of Northern Ontario has been their forest fires. I always think a fire in a forest is very much the same as a war for civilization. It brings sheer disaster. There is horror, there is destruction, and there is blackness over the whole country. It looks as if nothing would ever grow there again. Then, in an extraordinary way, the merciful rain descends and leaves are grown from some unknown source and the little flowers begin to grow up into the great sheaf of the fire weed, and unsuspected trees grow up again until in a few years there is another forest and another civilization, but standing there for generations afterward are the great black trunks like memorials, as a witness of the destruction that has gone before.

It is the land of forests in the north country. It is a land where men work hard. Some people seem to think that the people who live in the north land are people with weak heads and strong backs and willy weak muscle, but there is a certain philosophy of life that grows there that is very hard to find in other places where civilization blooms and becomes prosperous.

I want to say just a word to you about what we owe to the Indian, and I am speaking now, not in any religious sense at all, but simply as one who knows the Indian from childhood. You know, the Indian is a man apart. The Cree and the Ojibway lived in that great Northland long before the white man came to America. Where they came from, I don't know. You know, one of the things I have always thought as I listened to the Indian tongue is that language is one of the things that makes us believe that mankind had a higher existence in the historic past, in many cases, than he has now. To hear an Indian using his beautiful language with a paradigm of the verbs more complicated than that of the Greek grammar is almost like seeing a child playing with jewels on the shore, the value of which he hardly recognizes himself. But they did certain things, you know. Did you ever think of the mystery of the snowshoe? Did you ever think of the meaning of the rabbit skin blanket? In days when there was no central heating, in days when people didn't live in houses, the Indians made their rabbit skin blanket in a most extraordinary way. They had an old net hanging up, about eight feet square, and then they would take a hundred and fifty rabbit skins, cut by their wives and rolled in a string about as thick as your finger and these were loosely woven until you had a solid mat, as light as a feather, the air could go through it and it would enable you to sleep out when it was 50 below zero.

And the birch bark canoe, one of the most beautiful creations of the Indian. made it possible to travel over all those rivers and all the little boats of Canada, the Peterboroughs and the Chestnut canoes are the descendents of his birch bark canoe.

You know the Indian has a philosophy of life of his own. He toils not in the ordinary sense of the word. He has his good days. He takes what God gives him and somehow or other he loves to be able to live in his birch bark wigwam. There it is, like an inverted cone under the trees, everything clean-aromatic spruce boughs with a little fire in the centre of it, a deer skin door, and just as soon as it begins to get shabby, instead of having it redecorated, he simply moves it. He gets into a canoe and paddles fifty miles down the river. He starts housekeeping again and it is all done in an hour or so. Yes, they can teach us certain things.

One of the things I would like to say that I don't think we realize the value of that north country from the point of view of the tourists of the future. We have destroyed a great many things without knowing it. When I was a child I lived on Lake Nipigon and on the Nipigon River. It used to be the most beautiful river in North America, the greatest trout stream in the world, a clear, flashing stream that flows for forty miles between Lake Nipigon and Lake Superior. People used to come from all the civilized countries in the world. In the days when transportation was very difficult they used to come to the north country, come to the Nipigon River, and they used to catch trout that were a legend wherever sportsmen lived. Unfortunately, civilization made it necessary that there should be dams planted in the Nipigon River. Why, I don't know. Why it had to be the Nipigon River, I'm not quite sure. They were located at Virgin Falls and at Cape Alexander and the result is the river became sluggish, coarse fish came in, and the river is now only a legend of what is used to be fifty years ago.

However, these things are necessary for civilization. I want, however, especially today to talk to you about the pioneer spirit in that north country. I feel somehow or other that we here in Canada have almost come to the conclusion that we are so sophisticated, that we are so modern, that the old pioneer days ought to be forgotten. There was a time a hundred years ago when Toronto was a pioneer town. A hundred and fifty years ago we were very much the same as the people around Cochrane at the present minute. But for a long time progress was slow. Then the railway was built, and after the building of the railway some new inventions came and it changed, I think the psychological view of the average Canadian. I can remember when the motor car came and when it was possible for men to travel and for women to travel in a way that was unheard of in Toronto a hundred years ago.

Did you ever see the picture of the winter sports on Toronto Bay in the "Gay '70's"? Did you ever see pictures of the men with their long beards and with their otter skin caps and with their fur-lined coats and heavy gauntlets, as they used to trudge up Yonge Street in the '50's ?

But there came a time toward the end of the 19th century when the motor car arrived, when we began to make beautiful streets and when it was possible to have central heating, and all of a sudden people discovered it would be a good thing to give their fur caps and their fur mitts to the missionary bales and to try to forget that Canada was a pioneer country.

When I was a boy at College here I remember that Rudyard Kipling came through Canada on his first journey from India. He was just becoming world famous and he actually had the nerve to publish a poem when he got to Quebec, called "Our Lady of the Snows". I think some of you may be able to laugh at it now. They didn't laugh at it in Canada fifty years ago. The man was rent to pieces, metaphorically speaking, from Victoria right down to Halifax. They thought it was an insult that the matter of snow or ice or pioneer conditions should even be mentioned in Canada at all. In those days we had made up our mind that all that kind of thing was forgotten and as a matter of fact I think we ought to remember in this great province in which we live, in this city which is the centre of so much that is fine and beautiful and historic in the Empire, I think we should remember that we still have a duty to perform for this Canada of ours in the outlying places. Yes, the time is going to come when people are going to appreciate that Northland. We are going to realize something that they have already realized in Russia. You know, one of the things that I think is the miracle of the modern revelation of the Russian genius is the fact that they build their cities where their natural resources are to be found. They are not afraid of building a city in the far north, and we have always taken it for granted, I think--I may be wrong, I am speaking just on my own--we may be taking it for granted that Canada is the kind of country where there is only room for one particular section to have all the symbolism of a great country. That is not true. Northern Ontario has its story--that great pre-Cambrian shield.

I can remember long ago a certain missionary Bishop--I won't mention his name-he was a very good man and he was a bit of a poet too, and I can remember him making a missionary address about Canada. It was to an audience of English people and he said, Canada is one of the most extraordinary countries in the world but it has one great tragedy. He said, you know there are the great eastern provinces which are so fertile and so prosperous and have so great a future and then out in the West there is that great prairie land that is the future granary of the human race, but its two parts are linked together by an iron bar, a thousand miles of useless land-nothing but the rock of ages and Christmas trees.

You know, it is a strange thing but that rock of ages and the Christmas trees is probably the part of Canada that kept us from bankruptcy, during the years of the late lamented depression. Northern Ontario--I wouldn't be surprised if that land does not make Canada famous in the years to come, and above all, it gives us the opportunity of doing something spiritually with our lives. Why is it, I wonder, that there are so many people who feel that the comforts that they have, that the material things of life are the only things to be considered. Why is it that in Canada we have not been ready always to grasp the opportunities that lay before us? Do you know that when it came to sheer idealism on the sea or on the land or in the north in the old days, we used to find that it was people who came out from the Old Country and to whom the symbol and the glory of a big civilization didn't mean anything because they had seen the seamy side, too, those were the people who were willing to go into the north and to make a home for themselves. The romance of Canada as a rule does not appeal to Canadians. We are too near to it. You know, we come from the farms, we come from the townships, we come from the woods, and therefore, it is perfectly natural that we should begin to think about Toronto, Montreal, Hamilton or Kingston as being something like the Promised Land. But there is another side to it, too. You know, there is something in the North that you won't find anywhere else in this world. There is something that it does to the spirit. There is something of a philosophy that it gives you.

Have you known the Great White Silence, not a snowgemmed twig or quiver!
(Eternal truths that shame our soothing lives.)
Have you broken trail on snowshoes?--mushed your huskies up the river?
Dared the unknown, led the way and clutched the prize?
Have you marked the map's void spaces, mingled with the mongrel races,
Felt the savage strength of brute in every thew?
And though grim as hell the worst is, can you round it off with curses?
Then hearken to the North, it's wanting you.
Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory?
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
"Done things" just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
Seeing through the ice veneer the naked soul?
Have you seen God in his splendours-heard the text that nature renders?
(You'll never hear it in the family pew.)
The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things,
Then listen to the North: it's calling you.
They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through;
They have put you in a show case, you're a credit to their teaching,
But can't you hear the North?-it's calling you.
Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely island, I know.
There's a whisper in the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
And the North is calling, calling . . . let us go.

MR. HUMPHREYS: Gentlemen and Your Grace: I think perhaps it is fitting that the Reverend Mr. McCollum, Rector of St. John's Church, York Mills, should thank Bishop Renison.

REV. MR. MCCOLLUM: Mr. Crairman, Your Grace After listening to the Bishop-Elect of Moosonee, and the appeal he has given, one feels almost like going up there after him. You needn't be surprised if you find some of us up there sometime. I have been long enough in the north country to catch something of the spirit of what Dr. Renison has been telling us, that he has told us with that of the unusual touch of . mysticism that we rarely find.

Canada has been enriched by certain Bishops that came from Ireland in other days. We think of Sutherland, Dumoulin and Carmichael--they were all from Ireland--and Bishop Renison the Bishop of Moosonee, has come to us. The other day, I believe, if the journal is correct, he took confirmation in his new Diocese and talked to the Indians in their own language. A great gift that made the Indians feel very warm toward him.

I do not know that I have anything to say, except that I am very proud of this daughter church of St. Paul's, and the men who have ministered there. We are very proud of Dr. Cody, as I have told hire sometimes. We are very proud of Dr. Renison. He didn't build St. Paul's, but at a time when it was "Muddy York" down there, had St. James Cathedral, as it afterwards turned out to be. We had St. John's, York Mills. There was no motor power in those days. They had to do their grinding on the waters of the Don in those days. And men came and got the vision from that church and came down and started St. Paul's. They started Christ Church and they started St. Clements.

So I just want to say to the Bishop-Elect of Moosonee we have appreciated tremendously this picture of the North that he has given in such an original way, that he has given with such a flare for expression, and the beauty of his mysticism appeals to me tremendously, and I think appeals to us all.

On behalf of the guests here, I wish to express our appreciation to the Bishop-Elect of Moosonee. (Applause.)