ur
institution, we could win the world in the next half century. If we
are to be truest to the future, we must stand by the side of the Great
Teacher and proclaim a complete and perfect truth. Our platform should
be neither broader nor narrower than His. If there is one truth in
revelation that we can not give its proper setting and due emphasis,
then we are not the keepers of God's truth. To my thinking, there are
no organizations formed by man that can appeal more confidently to the
Word of God for confirmation than the Odd-Fellows. We appeal to sane
reason and common sense. No organization can hold up a higher ideal of
individual freedom and worth. But there is a danger that we become
narrow, that we violate the maxims of sane reason and common sense,
that we lose the balance between individual prerogative and the claims
of a united brotherhood. We can not accomplish the aims of our order
by onesidedness. We are to become "all things to all men." We are not
to be prisms breaking up the rays of light and declaring that this or
that color is the most important. We as Odd-Fellows are to be lenses,
converging the rays and bringing them to a focus upon the hearts of men
as the white light of God's eternal truth.

This is a practical age, and if we are to win we must demonstrate the
superiority of our faith and practice over that of other claimants, not
only in terms of the Written Word, but also in terms of manhood.
Odd-Fellowship is standing upon the golden dawn of a new morning. It
is to be a day of battle and conquest. It is truth blazoned upon the
page of history, that if we as Odd-Fellows are true to our standard, to
our possibilities and to our Maker, he will lay the suffering of a
throbbing world in our arms that we may lay it at the feet of Him who
died to redeem it. Let us cherish high hopes, noble aims, and lofty
ideals. Never since the world was peopled has mankind stood in such
anxious expectancy, awaiting the outcome of the immediate future, as in
these closing years of the nineteenth century. Men are wistfully
trying to peer through the portals of the year nineteen
hundred--marveling, as the effects and forces of applied science is
unfolded to our comprehension, and discovery moves on, each invention
leading in another, in stately procession; we, all the while rapt in
wonder, are straining in hope and fear to catch the coming word, and to
comprehend its import. Never was speculation so rife,