Order, forbidding them to fight save for Church or conviction, gave a death blow to feudalism.

Many religious forces are splendidly at work to see to it that in this Exposition of 1915 religion shall not be without its witness. Associations and committees, with the cordial co-operation of the Exposition and city authorities, are busily planning for both religious and moral safeguards and showing for those who come. Our committee of One Hundred is enlisting the interest of Christians at large in it as a distinctly religious center. But if we could only build of "such stuff as dreams are made of" a true St. Francis Exposition, it would help toward opportune idealism. All who name the name of Christ can join in it. St. Francis has been called a "Pan-Christian." In him the widest possible Catholic federation of Churches can unite Yes, Hebrew piety has some part in him as in us. In the "Canticle to the Sun" there lives again as a true Benedicite, the very genius of the psalmody of Israel. Some of us like, too, to dream of a great statue of the city's name saint some day to stand on one of San Francisco's hills, gleaming out to the prophecies and vast probabilities of the great Pacific as a flamen of "Character enlightening the world," a counterpart—yes, a supplement—to that statue by the metropolis of the Atlantic, “Liberty enlightening the world." And steps are being taken to use in some of our churches as an Exposition anthem— and churches of all names, and even synagogues would not have to change a single word of it-that exquisite "Canticle to the Sun" composed by St. Francis in his blindness, as if, when his earthly life was closing, he really saw glories irradiate only to the spiritual eye. It appeals to a Californian by its very atmosphere described by a French critic quoted in Knox-Little: "In it we feel the breath of that Umbrian terrestrial paradise where the sky is so brilliant and the earth so laden with flowers." Renan called it "the most perfect utterance of modern religious sentiment." A single verse of it in the translation of Matthew Arnold is this:

"Praised be my Lord God with all His creatures; and especially our brother the sun, who brings us the day, and who brings the light; fair is he, and shining with a very great splendor: O Lord, he signifies to us Thee."

At the opening exercises of the Exposition on Saturday, February 20, 1915 there being an estimated 350,000 before the open air speakers' stand-I was asked to say the Benediction, which was as follows:

"The Blessing of God Almighty, the God of the ages, the God of the oceans, the God of the continents, the God of all the genius of man, the God of every exposition of human achievement and progress, the God for the deepest penitence of our civilization and its highest praise—the Blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost be upon you and remain with you always. Amen."

R

CHAPTER XX

THE PRAYER BOOK CROSS

EFERENCE in a previous chapter has been made in passing to the placing in Golden Gate Park of the featuring monument known as the Prayer Book Cross. The annual service held at its base by the House of Churchwomen, that of 1923 being numbered as the eighteenth, and its landmark against the sky, as well as my interest in it both as a churchman and as a citizen of our city of rare antecedents, lead me to tell something here of the circumstances which gave it its commanding site in our far-famed Park and of its significance as a memorial. Soon after coming to California I became especially interested in the service held at Drake's Bay by the Chaplain of Drake's ship, the Rev. Francis Fletcher, and wrote a brief suggestion to our Pacific Churchman of the desirability of having some modest monument to mark the service and the historic spot. As a fugitive item this, in some way not known to me, came under the eye of my old St. James' Vestryman and warm friend, Mr. George W. Childs of the Philadelphia Ledger. He promptly wrote me bidding me to have a worthy memorial erected without being limited to cost, and to send him all the bills. It was first proposed to have it stand on the heights at Drake's Bay itself and to unveil it at the time of a projected meeting of a General Missionary Council of the Church, taking the assemblage to the Bay on an ocean steamer for the ceremony. That general meeting, however, was found impracticable and in the meantime Mr. William W. Stow, then President of the Park Commission, in behalf of the Commission, tendered the present site, and the form of the colossal Iona Cross was adopted and the inscription written with a view to its municipal setting. It was unveiled at the opening of the notable Mid-Winter Fair, January 1, 1894, in the presence of a large attendance of people, the Director

General of the Fair, Mr. M. H. De Young, presiding and making one of the addresses. After my acting for Mr. Childs in the presentation and the acceptance of it by Mr. Stow on behalf of the Golden Gate Park, Professor George Davidson, Ph.D., Sc.D., of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, the recognized authority on the Identification of Drake's Bay, delivered the Historical Address. A letter from Mr. Childs expressing his full satisfaction with the completed enterprise, only anticipated his death by a few weeks.

In further narration of the significance of the memorial I append with permission, the following article I wrote for Harper's Weekly of January 13, 1894:

A BIT OF ELIZABETHAN CALIFORNIA.

Some eleven centuries before it was called England, the country of the white cliffs was named Albion. And a generation before there was a New England on the Atlantic, there was a New Albion on the Pacific coast of the New World. In the British Museum the "side plan" of the map of Hondius, 1595, shows the Portus Novæ Albionis with all the quaint features of the old cartography; the ship of Sir Francis Drake, nearly as long as the width of the point of land which makes the "conuenient and fit harborough" of the narrative of the voyage in The World Encompassed. The natives, the trees, houses, and mountains, take all sorts of liberties with perspective, but leave no room for mistake about the purport of the sketch. "This country our General [Drake] named Albion," says the writer of the narrative probably Francis Fletcher, Drake's chaplain and chronicler "and that for two causes, the one in respect of the white bancks and cliffes which lie toward the sea, the other that it might have some affinity euen in name also with our country, which was sometime so called."

So long as a historic event is without its definite historic spot, and may have happened in any one of several places claimed for it, the antiquary can never find his true relish of it. We remember the story of the

unsophisticated visitor to Mount Vernon who wept copiously at the ice-house, until informed by the gardener that the tomb was "further on," but she obviously had not the true instinct of the antiquary. That will not let one rest until he is sure of the historic spot, if there be any way of settling it. Much interest has been drawn to and considerable has been written about the landing of Sir Francis Drake on that memorable voyage when, with the Pelican-afterwards named the Golden Hinde, in honor of Sir Christopher Hatton's coat of arms-he "ploughed a furrow around the world." Not to speak of the works of the Hakluyt Society, and the older accounts of the voyage, the editor of The History of the American Episcopal Church, Bishop Perry, called attention to the fact that to Francis Fletcher, Drake's chaplain, “belongs the honor of being the first in English orders who ministered the Word and Sacraments within the territory of the United States," and that at Drake's landing place "the words of the Common Prayer were first heard on the Pacific Coast." Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in the Narrative and Critical History of America, furnishes a chapter on Hawkins and Drake, followed by a "Critical Essay on Drake's Bay," all of which has his characteristic charm of telling and of carrying the reader with him. The "Editorial Notes on the Sources of Information" which follow Dr. Hale's contribution give an exhaustive list of authorities and views. And yet the question where the "faire and good bay" was, had to be left undecided, with a preponderating opinion in favor of San Francisco Bay. There was really, when all was said, no such case made out for any point as to relieve the mind of the lurking suspicion that, after all, it might have been at some other point.

It was not until March, 1889, that a paper was read before the California Historical Society which had the assuring title Identification of Sir Francis Drake's Anchorage on the Coast of California in the Year 1579. The writer was Professor George Davidson, Ph.D., Sc.D.,