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 172our 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 173his 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 174High 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 175some 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 176cheerfully 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 177of 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 178the 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 179of 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 180the 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. 181This 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 ther............