ardful of each other's rights must line up on one side or
the other. In addition to our churchly ties and duties, we have family
duties, and there begins the first of duty, first of government, first
of obligations as citizens. And so I say we live in relation to those
who surround us, and we can not live unmindful of them. We are touched
by humanity everywhere, and walk elbow to elbow down the vale of life,
supporting or destroying, and whether our pilgrimage be long or short
we can not destroy the facts as they exist.

It must be seen with only a hasty glance that with the varying
conditions of men, with their different mental dispositions, moral
ideas and social status, that a crying demand comes all the time for
some organization where men can unite on a common level--some place
where a divergence of political or moral views do not bar an entrance,
where the family ties remain sacred, and more sacred because of the
organization. It seems that men groped about for just such an
organization, and men's wants are necessities, and social and civil
status might be brought to a common level with all who might be brought
into the assembly. It is believed by Odd-Fellows that our organization
furnishes just this want. All the life that a man wants outside of his
spiritual life has its food here, and society and family and man's
relations to man have been helped by it. I state it without fear of
contradiction, that no order has been more potent for good than ours.
It has been the hand-maiden of civilization wherever it has established
itself; it has smoothed out the asperities of life for many, many
individuals; it has defended character, protected life and limb, and
stood as champion of all good between man and man and between God and
man.

Every agency by which men are advanced, socially and morally, is an
agency that guides government and state and individual up to a higher
plane of development. Odd-Fellowship and Christianity go hand in hand.
There is not a tenet of the order in any department that is repugnant
to the highest development of Christianity. Indeed, it could not be
so, for any lesson that is drawn from the three pillars of our order,
Faith Hope and Charity, is a lesson pointing to the better life here
and hereafter.

In the eighty years, last past, who can estimate the benign influence
of the lives and actions of men, yea, on their eternal destinies, of
the oft-repeated utterances pointing to the F