He was ripe to receive his call at last, and it came. It took him to a life of rough hardship as a missioner in the North-West, all among lumbermen and miners with a congregation to be gathered first, and sore deeficult to sway in assembly. He came well-shod to the work of treading out the harvest in the Lord’s vineyard. He could go into the woods and come out again, or face a man mad with drink, or comfort a sick mother. A tall, slender, well set up young missioner with no very much ruddiness of complexion and a thoughtful, serious face that could yet smile, for a’ that, with crinkles in the eye corners. You would know him for Scots by his look, but the rest is puir American. And he loved those men among whom his work lay. When, along in 1894 and him just well into his thirties, he was asked to a city church, he didna want to respond favourably until he saw where his duty lay. Well, then, he came to Winnipeg and to the ministry of St. Stephen’s because it offered him the grand chance to help those roughened men whose needs he knew. Ye ken, perhaps, Mr. J. A. MacDonald of the Toronto Globe newspaper. MacDonald had been a classmate of Charley Gordon’s and a year or two after Charley Gordon came as preacher to St. Stephen’s, MacDonald was owner of a new little paper called The Westminster and concerned with Canadian Presbyterianism—a frank experiment. Into the office of The Westminster dropped Charley Gordon one fine day. He was in a great heat for money to put into the foothills and the mountain camps. They needed missions out there; I’m burning up with the wish to write an article telling about those men in the pines and along the upland lakes, Charley Gordon tells MacDonald. I’ve facts and figures. MacDonald was quick to say, if Charley wanted to bring home his message to people and loosen the purse-strings, he had a duty to write the thing as a tale, paint a picture with lifelike figures and a warm feeling running through it all. Gordon minded himself of what he had seen and heard in such good plenty; and he went home and sat down to write a story of Christmas Eve among the lumbermen in the Selkirk mountains. When he was fair into it, he found himself carried back and away, so much so that in reading it through after he didna see what brother clergymen might make out of the ringing speech of some of his characters. MacDonald agreed, but sent to find out what name to put on the story. Gordon invented a name, Cannor, out of the first letters of “Canada” and “North-West.” MacDonald picked up the reply telegram and snorted disdain. Cannor, he commented, what sort of a name is that! I’ll make it Connor. And where’s a first name? Frank? Fred? Chris? No. Ralph? Aye, we’ll make it that. This was the birth and christening together, ye’ll ken. The tale of the lumbermen’s Christmas Eve in the mountains was later to become the first chapter of the novel, Black Rock, the first novel by Ralph Connor, that was read everywhere.
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I’ll not have to be telling you what it was in Black Rock won so many readers for Ralph Connor. Humour and pathos are bound up in the lives the young minister of St. Stephen’s was writing about; ye could lay hold quickly of his sympathy for those men who were in some ways as helpless as bairns and were half-brutalised by their work and surroundings. It’s the effect they have on each other, too. Them picking up Black Rock to read were struck with something fresh and wild and clean, withal. They sensed a tenderness about the feeling of the story, like heather softening the bare hillside, and more than a morsel of the everlasting hope in which men endure hard and lonely toils. The same held true of the books that followed Black Rock; for there had to be other books. Ye mind The Sky Pilot and The Man From Glengarry and The Foreigner and Corporal Cameron and The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail. Take The Foreigner. On the edge of Winnipeg, Charles Gordon found a Settlement of Slavs—Ruthenians, Russians, Galicians and who not. They lived in a grim little collection of huts, a dozen in a room, all huddled up, drinking and dirty and violent; and on them was still the shadow of tyrannies in the Old Country. Drinking and dirty and violent with a violence dark and beautiful, Charles Gordon found them. Aye, he found the huts and the men, and Ralph Connor that was in him found a story. Ralph Connor took the splendid young heart in Kalmar, the son of a nihilist, and brought it to fight its way out of the ruck of aliens and make for the new country beyond the Saskatchewan, where there is prairie and where the lakes lie on the surface of the prairie like jewels on a woman’s breasts. Then, in Corporal Cameron, was Connoring the first grand tale of the North-West Mounted Police, by a man who kenned them, as followers in his tracks scarce can be said to. A richt fine love story is this of the lad who was born in a Scottish glen and came to ride out in the Canadian blizzards; it’s furthered in The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail, which makes use of the half-breed and Indian rebellion of Louis Riel. But there’s a muckle I love in the book besides the adventure—Cameron and his gold-haired, plucky wife and the hesitant wonder of the first fine feeling of the lover. It fashes me how a man says what’s down in the hearts of such a many other men and women. Give me to understand how it’s done! Here’s the Reverend Charles Gordon dwelling this quarter century and longer in Winnipeg, building up St. Stephen’s and seeing it transformed from a plain chapel of wood into a handsome church of stone, with a church house where the young men without homes can live, and where there’s sewing and amateur acting and films and bowling every night of the week. In the daytime the Reverend Gordon will maybe attend court to help get some boy straightened out and become a guardian to him; or he’ll be at meetings in his church where revolutionary agitators are spouting the downfall of all institutions and then voting thanks to the preacher because, as they put it, he has given us an absolutely square deal. And after supper you would find him in his home at evening prayers with the three youngsters who appeared to enjoy their devotions. There’s no stiltedness in the man at all. He reads from Scripture concerning Paul taking Timothy with him to learn what were the problems of that day. And he closes the book on his finger to remark what a sensible, canny thing for Paul to do. Some of our theological seminaries, adds the father, shut a man out from contact with life, shut him up with professors, and when he comes out of his cloister he canna recognise a social problem if it walks up to him on the street. The trouble with me, he finishes, when I had gotten out of the seminary.
But he’s generous to a fault sore in a son of Scots folk. If his right hand is earning moneys with a pen, his left hand is spending lavish and free. There’s his salary as minister to the kirk goes flowing out several times over in gifts and helpings to people. I mind the year quite long back when the Presbyterian General Assembly of Canada was meeting in Toronto and Doctor the Reverend Gordon put down $10,000 so every missionary minister and his wife in the breadth of Canada might attend the General Assembly, expenses paid. Some of these men and their wives hadn’t been out of the woods in years. Ralph Connor knew what this meant.
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Then, when the Great War came thundering, our sky pilot stood up and said Canada must send a half million men. Many scoffed at him; but he was right, and we sent the half million and over sixty thousand didna come back. From St. Stephen’s there was an enlistment of close on four hundred, including the minister and five members of the Session. The dominie went in the spring of 1915 after the congregation had confirmed his leave of absence—Major Charles W. Gordon, chaplain to the Forty-third Battalion Cameron Highlanders of Canada. Many St. Stephen’s men were enrolled in this battalion and one of the members of the Session, Robert McDonald Thomson, was their first colonel. It was the Western Front—from the Ypres Salient, Sanctuary Wood, the bloodshed of the Somme and back again to Arras. In that time Ralph Connor saw the regiment shrunk from full strength to two officers and sixty-five men. He knelt down amid the roar of guns and the hailing of machine gun bullets to do last rites for his own men and comrades. Among them was Colonel Thomson. On the eighth day of October, 1916, the outfit stormed the Regina Trench on the Somme. Unable to advance, they wouldna retreat. So they died where they stood.
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The Major and The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land are books ye’ll verra well recollect; likewise the novel of twa years back, To Him That Hath. Since ye hanna read it, it’s the new novel from the pen of Ralph Connor, I’ll just speak a word of to ye. He calls it The Gaspards of Pine Croft and explains it is “a romance of the Windermere Valley.” A story of the life and moulding of Paul Gaspard, it is. Here’s a mon with two powerful strains mixed and fighting for mastery of him. From his mither, Paul inherits a rare sense of the presence of God; his father gifted him with a fine artist sense, and a bounding spirit, a passion for life to the full. The clash of the two men in the boy grows with him to manhood, so that after the death of his mither he stands between two women, who beckon different ways. Then when a great decision is put before him the mon takes upon himself a burden and a responsibility that test him body and soul. ’Tis a life and death struggle set in the grand country Ralph Connor makes his own. There’s the valley of the Windermere before you with the Gaspard ranch, Pine Croft, flanked on one side by a great bend of the Columbia River and on the other by a mountain wall of virgin forest. In this mysterious wilderness, the figures of Indians do come and go, touching the lives of the white people with disaster, with dread—with an unco beauty as well.
Books by Ralph Connor
Beyond the Marshes
1898 Black Rock
1899 The Sky Pilot
Ould Michael
1901 The Man from Glengarry
1902 Glengarry School Days
Breaking the Record
1904 The Prospector
The Pilot of Swan Creek
Gwen
1906 The Doctor of Crow’s Nest
The Life of Dr. James Robertson
1909 The Foreigner; A Tale of Saskatchewan
The Angel and the Star
The Dawn by Galilee
The Recall of Love
1912 Corporal Cameron of the North-West
Mounted Police: A Tale of the MacLeod
Trail
1914 The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail
1917 The Major
1919 The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land
1921 To Him That Hath
1923 The Gaspards of Pine Croft