Springfield (Ill.) -- Fiction; Springfield (Ill.) -- In literature; Utopias in literature
“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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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