MATTERS TOUCHING ST. FRIEND, THE GIVER OF BREAD, AND HIS ORDER OF THE
STRICT OBSERVANCE AND HIS ORDER OF THE LIBERAL OBSERVANCE.
June 1, 2018:—In the capital of Illinois, in this year of grace, St.
Friend is a healer of the body and soul. He is more of a philosopher
than the fuming Black Hawk Boone, that is, he has a cooler disposition.
Yet Boone heals by hard maxims, given with that lovely fruit, the
Amaranth-Apple. St. Friend heals by sermons and prayers and the pictured
parables, the rituals envisaged and illuminated in the celebration of
the Office of the Blessed Bread.
The real name of our saint, which no one ever hears, is Hugh Adams
Matheney. He is, away and beyond, the oldest of the Board of Education
or of any of the leaders of the city. He has little fire in his blood,
but has still the greatest reserve battery of nervous force. He was,
even as a little boy, a protege and disciple of St. Scribe of the
Shrines, who was then in the height of his glory as a leader of our
town. He preceded St. Friend as the dominating figure of the Cathedral
of St. Peter and St. Paul and handed down to him and to the whole city
the old doctrine, with a new emphasis, that the whole human race is the
mystical body of Christ, soon to be raised from the dead. On his
mother’s side St. Friend is a descendant of a long line of members of
the Church of the Disciples. On his father’s side his ancestors are
notable in several lines, for instance, the Matheneys of Springfield.
The original Matheneys put up one of the first three settlers’ log
cabins ever erected in this county. The Adams strain is from New
Harmony, Indiana. There they were bakers for several generations. The
cottage of St. Friend has his baker’s coat of arms painted over the
little front door, over the tremendous open fireplace, and in the little
dining room. On one slender pole, in front of his cottage, all of his
family flags are flying. The most important of the flags, in the
estimation of St. Friend, is that of the clan of these same Adams people
from New Harmony.
St. Friend is the last of his actual clan to be a baker, though the town
is full of his first and second cousins;—and third cousins, indeed, that
claim him proudly. He has adopted a son, an orphan boy, early
apprenticed to his flour barrels by the school authorities, a boy of
Thibetan ancestry and one of a small local group of Thibetans. He is now
grown. Except for ceremonial occasions he has long graduated from
baking. He is occupied in designing more exquisite and slender sunset
towers, of the school of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, to
add one more circle to the outer ring, when purple cottages and old
buildings have been sufficiently cleared away. He is known as the “young
St. Friend” or the “Thibetan boy.”
When I have passed him on the street, I have observed him muttering to
himself or occasionally walking and arguing with the other Thibetans. He
looks every inch the stranger, with square face and almond eyes, and
skin brickdust red, with heavy bronze beneath it.
The sister of St. Friend, living in the same cottage, a mild, ghostly
creature, creeping about, is more than a centenarian. She remembers the
celebration of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. She was then a baby in
her father’s arms, and held out her hands to catch the falling showers
of confetti thrown from the high buildings. She thought it was snow.
St. Friend graduated from the Hay-Edwards school. He went through one of
Springfield’s High Schools. He continued on for a while through the
Municipal University of the town. He attended a college of his faith at
Washington, D. C. He then became a novice of the order of St. Scribe of
the Shrines and took that discipline as literally as possible.
St. Friend is a close correspondent of the hundred radical bishops who
are, often in remoter fashion, followers of St. Scribe of the Shrines,
while at the same time they are conserving the results of the Church
Revolution. Two of these bishops, the present leaders of the order, were
young pilgrims with him when he made the journey commanded by St.
Scribe, the pilgrimage around the world to the one hundred shrines of
the one hundred religions, beginning with the Tomb of Lincoln. The boy
returned while St. Scribe was still in his prime and a rousing,
dominating figure in the city. The boy became the private secretary of
the Saint. When the saint was an old man, the disciple was his
confidential adviser and finally, when the great man departed this life,
the office of leading the Cathedral flock naturally devolved upon the
disciple. It was about this time that the rumor began to move among the
people that the departed St. Scribe was once Hunter Kelly and it slowly
became the fashion, with some of the more fanciful citizens, to speak of
Hunter Kelly-St. Scribe as though they were one guardian spirit. St.
Friend was offered the headship of the order of St. Scribe but he
refused it and, without abandoning his place and the prescribed forms
and prayers of this discipline, he set up quite a separate order of his
own, the Order of the Blessed Bread of the Strict Observance, and today
he has proclaimed from the Cathedral pulpit the setting up of a more
popular order, of the more liberal observance, and though there is much
not yet cleared up by the sermon, Avanel is resolved to join, if
possible, and recruit me, if it may be done.
This is the history of The Order of The Strict Observance:—For many
years St. Friend has given himself, in true devotion, as a member of the
Springfield Associated Charities, to provide for the handful of
defectives, drug fiends, and those outlaws who are now classed with them
by common consent:—the unskilled laborers. St. Friend finds in his heart
a great Franciscan pity for them. He finds there a sharp social
rebellion that there should be any outlaws or helpless ones whatever. So
he has become, by acclamation, the perpetual head of the Associated
Charities, and these feverish wanton ones have been cheerfully left to
his over-solicitude. The entire contingent of the socially crippled cuts
as small a figure on the general horizon of the city as did the group of
the professional paupers in the days when blind men turned hand organs.
The educational machinery is such that within the double city walls,
built long ago by Ralph Adams Cram, the so-called “exploited” have long
been kept out. People in general are well-fed, super-skilled laborers.
And they have about all the carnal bread and all the carnal circuses
they can well digest.
But St. Friend, who in his youth wept for every fallen sparrow till he
could weep no more, has long maintained his Order of the Blessed Bread
of the Strict Observance for those left behind in the race, generally
degenerate sons and daughters of old settlers. The order is properly
called the “Brotherhood of the Blessed Bread.” Those who join eat of a
bread baked from a special Sangamon County wheat, planted between the
inner and the outer wall by some of the various sects of the Flower
Religion and the Park Religion. St. Friend cares not what sect plants
the wheat, so it be planted by those who believe in democracy and
prayer.
After due vigil, the bread is skilfully baked by the Thibetan boy, or
other chosen members of the society. Those who eat of it are exhorted,
but not commanded, to take the oath before John Boat, for the bread,
till now, has been primarily intended for the Brotherhood of the Strict
Observance.
This oath before John Boat or other cooperating justice of the peace is
printed in the little book of devotion that goes with the Strict
Observance. The book and oath are intended for the most hopeless
derelicts only. Presumably the bread is eaten for the first time by
these, after the oath is administered.
The gray-headed old justice of the peace furnished the idea himself,
when he and St. Friend were young men, and St. Friend kept the copy of
the oath and brooded upon it long before he felt it politic to found the
order. John Boat had observed, in his experience as a notary, that men,
who seem but animated putrescence, still regard their sworn word in
court. It is the last chance to put iron into them. This thought in
mind, the oath is administered with the solemnity that went into the old
monastic vows. From the many who have been given life by the oath, St.
Friend has taken great assurance that he is on the road to a tremendous
social amelioration.
June 2:—Because Avanel and I have decided to join the more liberal
observance of the Order of the Blessed Bread, though we, as yet, know
little about it, she is eager to show to me the occasion of the
administering of the oath of the Strict Observance. This Monday morning
we are taking the back bench in the shadowy corner of the justice court
to watch the older ceremonial. Now most oaths in court are rattled off
like parrot words, but to John Boat this is an occasion when he is a
priest after the order of Melchizedek. He gives a seeming dignity to the
most carping and exacting demand of the pledge, reading it line upon
line. Blue-faced Surto Hurdenburg, the derelict, echoes him with full
and honest intent, repeating every line after the learned court with
great respect and devotion.
This is the text of the pledge:—
State of Illinois
City of Springfield,
June 2, 2018.
I, Surto Hurdenburg, accepting the lordship of Christ, do solemnly
swear, by the everliving God, that from this time henceforth I will
support the Constitution of the World Government, the Constitution of
the United States, the Laws of Illinois, the Ordinances of Springfield,
that I will faithfully observe and keep inviolate the moral laws of the
community; that I will carefully and faithfully observe my duty to my
neighbor, recognizing his rights at all times; that I will endeavor to
become an expert workman and member of a guild; that I will faithfully,
honestly and conscientiously exercise my rights of franchise as a member
of my guild and a citizen of the community, with a firm determination to
bring about the best results for clean and honest government, and that I
will devote as much strength as possible to the study of civic reform,
examining at all times the opinions of clean-minded radical citizens and
acting on them according to the dictates of my conscience. I
specifically promise to abstain from motion-picture shows, yellow dance
halls, bad women, alcoholic liquors and narcotics, and to denounce and
work against in every way possible the traffic in Singaporian cocaine.
Further and finally, I promise to eat the Blessed Bread of this Order of
the Strict Observance, according to the manner and at the times laid
down in the Book of Devotion, and to follow the discipline for body and
soul there prescribed and imposed for the good of the order and the
health and well-being of my city.
(Signed) Surto Hurdenburg.
Subscribed and sworn to before me this Second Day of June, 2018.
(Seal) John Boat
Notary Public.
I conclude that, in the light of Springfield life as I have seen it
these strange days, it will be easier for such as Surto Hurdenburg to
keep the more literal specifications of the pledge, such as the ban on
motion pictures, than to enter into the deep mazes of citizenship with
judgment. He will keep close to St. Friend and the order, who hate the
films, and thereby be able to let the films alone. Most photoplays
outside of the educational buildings or beyond the immediate
jurisdiction of the World’s Fair authorities are shown on the right or
left of the sauntering corridors opening on the Yellow Dance Halls on
the same floors. Here half-hour lengths of film are run through, when
the crowd sweeps in to rest. The merits of the exceedingly artistic
studio and theatre, called “The Egyptian Photoplay Association,” headed
by Gwendolyn Charles and Rabbi Terence Ezekiel remain unappreciated by
St. Friend and the members of the Order of the Strict Observance. This
in spite of the fact that the Photoplay Association in question now has
in charge most of those exquisite and unimpeachable film theatres of the
University World’s Fair and several other worth-while film-theatre
circuits in Central Illinois. “The Egyptian Photoplay Association” will
rent slightly worn films to Yellow Dance Halls, after first runs in
these others, and thereby make the films in the eyes of the Order of the
Strict Observance, mere devil’s nets for fish.
So, though the highly esteemed Rabbi Terence Ezekiel tries to act as
mediator, there is eternal war between the fiery Gwendolyn Charles and
this saint.
For a long time back truly aesthetic and truly educational motion
pictures have been shown in the school and University class rooms. Many
of them are scientific and historical records and renderings. In the odd
hours of loafing through these three months I have noted many of them as
of the best gifts of the new time. But our stubborn St. Friend, as a
member of the school board, generally votes against them, and in
solitary grandeur. While at one with the general policies of the
educational system, he makes many a speech before the members for the
restoration of the regime of the book and the blackboard. He truly says
that these are now almost abolished in the presence of the protean
triumphant films, of the street pageantry, the training of skilled labor
in the high schools, of the oral, the phonographic, telegraphic and
telephone methods, applied to all forms of teaching. And only last week
he met what appeared to be his Waterloo when it was voted to extend and
enlarge the entirely respectable, if a little frigid, university dance
halls and to include motion picture loafing rooms, the better to run
competition with the Yellow Halls.
Some of these things I go over with Avanel, as we walk home from
witnessing Surto Hurdenburg’s oath, and we wonder just what of the
forbidden things, besides motion pictures, St. Friend will include in
his pledge for the Liberal Observance. Avanel says: “I admit that the
men who are sworn in, like this Surto Hurdenburg, are apt to become
useful, if fanatical, citizens. Their poor strength must be economized
in narrow channels if it is to last and be recuperated. But if St.
Friend tries to put such a set of chains on me I will not speak to him
for a month.”
Saturday, June 7:—St. Friend has today given it out by word of mouth and
by editorials in the five papers that the whole world is welcome to his
bread. The Order of the Liberal Observance is already more popularly
called by the alternate descriptive title: “The Citizens in the
Communion of the Blessed Bread.” There is no oath; even a Quaker may
join.
Sunday, June 8:—It is the warmest morning of the year, so far, in an
exceedingly backward summer. It is the first real June weather, and all
the people rejoice in it. Avanel walks to church in the most wonderful
of white airy dresses. And in these vacuum-cleaned streets, with no soot
and no coal dust and no factory grime, people, working or playing, can
be dressed all day as for a party if they choose.
All day yesterday couriers of all faiths, representing St. Friend’s
personal rather than his religious companions, have been out inviting
the people. At least one member of each family has been asked to bring
his tribe to the Cathedral green and to listen and carry the message
back with the bread.
Avanel and I are early for Church and so we make a circuit, enjoying the
airy splendors of the crowd. And we go around by St. John’s Hospital, so
lately rebuilt by the insistence of Mayo Sims, to vindicate his
scientific zeal, and they say it is a splendid scientific monument to
any man. It is east of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, as it
has been for over four generations. And the heretic synagogue and the
school for teaching Hebrew, conducted by Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, are on
the sites where the two orthodox synagogues were, one hundred years ago.
The green in front of the Cathedral was enclosed by a beautiful Gothic
wall long ago, at the same time the devout congregation rebuilt the
church. The enclosure is rapidly filling with people. St. Friend is to
speak to the whole city from the Cathedral steps.
Piled on great wooden trays on the side of the Cathedral steps are the
splendid brown loaves, put there for all the world by the Brotherhood of
the Strict Observance, who are about in their almost monkish official
robes, proud indeed to be so prominent.
Blue-faced Surto Hurdenburg, so lately sworn in, is an ex-headwaiter of
alleged New York hotel training and he is now to prove his mettle. He is
about his task decorously and swiftly enough, for those seated and
settled already have the tissue-wrapped loaves in their laps, and all
through the sermon, as fast as our citizens are settled, they are given
their loaves without a sound or a grimace, and Hurdenburg, the
efficient, rises high at once in the estimation of the children of
light.
But now the saint rises to speak. He is indeed a figure; his white hair
gleams in the June morning air. His face is the face of Lincoln, grown
old, with a touch of St. Francis eternally young. He straightens to his
full height. He is fifty years younger. He is one of those capable of
seeming collapse for weeks, when it is but the storage time, and then
the lightning is discharged in one tremendous hour.
There is a certain vast medieval humor about him. He is vested in his
ceremonial baking apron and Avanel giggles till he actually begins to
speak. This is the end of his sermon:—
“Pray consider that, in your freedom from vows this splendid June day,
you are nevertheless dubbed knights, my fellow citizens. In medieval
times monks and knights served the Church with the same divine vocation
and devotion.
“The Church of Springfield has come. It is the sunlit grass of this
park; it is this Illinois sky. Under the roof of this Cathedral behind
me and of all the churches, temples, and synagogues of this town, its
primer work has been done and will be done. It will begin with sheltered
faiths and will not contradict or undermine any.
“It seems that we must periodically sing hymns and look at the little
jeweled holy things and read the precious little books, or we cannot go
on and out and up. There was only one Johnny Appleseed in the history of
mankind. His image is in our Cathedral, but even he read Swedenborg and
clung to that system. Yet sooner or later, like that great saint Johnny
Appleseed, we awaken to our great outdoors, and all the visions there.
“All Holy worship, learned, as when Johnny Appleseed walked the
highroad, or the primer lesson when he first read Swedenborg beneath his
boyhood roof, makes over the mere bread of comradeship into this blessed
bread which will heal our shameful diseases of body and of soul.
“Share it, share it! When we have shared the blessed bread, communing
like true friends, the beauty of all Heaven, the sea in which we move
that is above all and through all and in all, will gild more perfectly
the Springfield daily grind and the Springfield sabbath. The devout
convert and his child and his grandchild will build his house as
beautifully as our Sacred Apple Tree is made, as righteously as the
Sacred Oak Tree, as democratically as the Golden Rain Tree, which
spreads its branches like a gate for all of us to pass through in
equality. The devout convert will build such architecture as glitters in
the songs and books of devotion of St. Scribe.
“The voices of the children will be as noble as the discourses of the
prairie winds that catch our tree boughs at sunset. Every house will be
as delicate and subtle as the ferny hollows of the Sangamon. The convert
will name many birds that will come at his call and he will feed them
crumbs of this Blessed Bread in friendship.
“When Springfield has partaken of this manna for a generation, all
things will become new. Leavening thoughts will come from all the street
corners. Novel fancies will come from the coffee houses. The conferences
and colloquies of fallible men will take on something of the aspect of
the meetings of the inspired souls of Heaven.
“We walk our plain path! We eat our plain bread in a rare fellowship!
Therefore all things become eternal. The Church of Springfield, the
church of this sunlit grass, the church of a million days and nights, is
proclaimed from the steps of this Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul
this day.”
And now Avanel comments:—“If you look deeply into the aphorisms my
father serves with his apples and with his paper money theory, you will
find, though he is no atheist or mocker, he is a son of the narrow, dry
antagonisms of some of the village atheist stock with which our blood
mingled during our sojourn in Egypt. I glory in my Indian ancestry, even
if I do not make myself conspicuous with my hair loose and my left hand
crimson. But as to my father’s village-infidel streak, I have no use for
it. Moreover, I heard him ding dong his doctrines in my childhood at
times when he was not at his best. I know better how to take St. Friend.
Both are narrow as mousetraps on their literal side, if one has a turn
for being caught.
“I think I choose St. Friend for my guide, because he begins and ends
with prayer. I do not stay away from motion pictures, as he commands,
nor from the Yellow Dance Halls, as he and my father both command. But I
distrust these places, because of the warnings of these good men. I will
eat this bread, you and I will eat it together, though I know it is
railed at in the Yellow Dance Halls, and I know the keen things that are
said there against such superstitions. We will continue to eat together
the Amaranth-Apples that are tabooed there. We will read together the
proverbs and songs and prayers of St. Scribe and, while our feet may be
in the Yellow Halls, our souls will be making the pilgrimage of the one
hundred religions. We will be thinking together how the whole human race
is the body of Christ, soon to be raised from the dead.”
And so this evening Avanel invites me to her own select table in the inn
at the top of one of the great northwest gates, the inner gate, that
overlooks the former village of Ashland, Cass County, and is one of the
chief glories of the Inner Wall. It is the Musicians’ Building and from
here oftener than anywhere else on this wall, sound the special evening
hymns and organ solos and chimes, over this whole segment of the city
and over the forest parks to the north, between the walls. Pilgrims pass
through the gate beneath us. They have visited, according to the ritual,
Lincoln’s monument, the First Shrine of St. Scribe—Hunter Kelly, and
they are hurrying along his great highway leading northwest through the
Gate of the Outer Wall, that overlooks the former village of Virginia in
old Cass County.
Our refractory is called:—The Pilgrim’s First Inn. It is on the
cafeteria principle but is a most spacious place, being the whole floor
of the tower, with tremendous sheets of glass for windows, so that an
aviator, circling it, can see straight through it from every angle, and
all the colored and decorative searchlights of this happy June evening
sweep through it as the twilight comes on, lights for the most part of
the delicate tints of the towers:—more like rapid clouds, left over from
the sunset, than sharp, searching, swords.
So Avanel and I find our table, in proper chatting distance from several
others, some of whom have also brought their brown loaf. And we carry
from the counter a few things like coffee and butter and Amaranth-Apples
and we banquet. She speaks more lovingly of her father’s many moods. She
divides the apples, uttering at the same time scraps of his philosophy.
At last we take the bread of St. Friend. It is our communion service,
High Mass of comradeship.
Avanel quotes from the Gospel of Luke,—from Luke’s deathless story of
the first communion.
There is a ringing of bells all over the city, silvery and sweet, and in
every tower of the walls:—the ringing of the star chimes. It is a clear
night. The sweeping colored lights are gone. We go to the great expanse
of windows and look up.
Avanel says:—“The trouble with this breaking of bread is that it is a
pledge to break our bodies. I do not want to break mine for a long time,
if ever.”
“Yet,” I say, “You ride your pale war horse.” Avanel, the dancer,
replies:—“Let us hope that the war will never come. Let us hope, before
the time war is due, the body of Christ, the whole human race, will be
raised from the dead.”