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.