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