An Apostle of the North: Memoirs of the Right Reverend William Carpenter Bompas

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., editor of the
Canadian Evangelical Review, and an instructor of Liturgy, Anglican
Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C.

The 19th century was the great missionary for Anglicanism. A mission
field that captured the imagination of many Anglicans in Eastern Canada
and Britain was the Canadian North. It was a remote, forbidding, and
thus romantic land, and its people were regarded as primitive heathens
in need of the Gospel and the enlightenment of Christian society.
Missionaries who dared to take Christianity to such a place were seen as
heroes, and some, such as Bishop William Carpenter Bompas, were publicly
treated as such.

The main part of this book is the original biography of Bompas by H.A.
Cody, an Anglican priest who served under Bompas for the last two years
of the bishop’s life, and who went on to become a novelist of some
reputation in Canada from World War I into the Depression. After
providing one chapter on Bompas’s pre-Canadian life, Cody portrays his
subject’s missionary career as the Bishop of Athabaska and
subsequently as the first bishop of the Yukon. The tone of the book is
one of “muscular Christianity,” with Bompas presented as an
outstanding hero of the mould.

Cody’s book is our primary source on Bompas. For this reprint,
Canadian historians William R. Morrison and Kenneth S. Coates provide an
85-page introduction intended to help the reader understand the world of
Bompas and Cody. Their notes have a less-than-complete understanding of
Anglicanism, and so are prone to attribute to Bompas’s Baptist
background concerns and stances that he shared with many lifelong low
church Anglicans of that era. In spite of this lapse, their notes are a
worthwhile addition to Cody’s book.