Chapter VI: Part 6

The good Odd-Fellow has constantly before his mind the book of books. His first sight into a lodge-room catches sight of that divine missive to man. It is his solace in life, and its precepts his consolation in death. It ever stands to him as an exhaustless fountain of truth. On these three cardinal principles he lives and dies, and in the constancy of that life we venerate his memory and do him kindly offices. It is the nature of a man to be communistic. It is only the anchorite that withdraws himself from the societies of man and communes with himself and his God. All right-thinking men desire and enjoy the society of their kind and kindred spirits. You had as well lock the sane man in the felon's cell as to doom him to live without the society of his fellows. The family is the first and best society. Perhaps the church is next, which is only the human family on a larger scale, fitting and preparing the members for a community in that house not made by hands. Next to my church I prize the secret organization to which I belong, where the cardinal principles of our holy Christianity are taught. The deathless friendship of David and Jonathan teaches me that though I may live in the king's palace, be clothed in purple and fine linen every day, be in the line of regal succession, yet I do not live to myself.

I would herald broadcast that tenet of our order, "that we do for others as we would have others do for us, and that if I find my brother in distress, I must bind up his wounds, lift him from the quagmire of despond and set him on his feet." If any lesson stands out boldly before the mind of the Odd-Fellow it is truth. He finds it on his banner wherever he goes. Friendship is ephemeral. It lasts only through life. It may die, it will die. The grave ends it all. The silent messenger that comes to king and peasant alike, and causes the scepter of the monarch to be laid by the crook of the shepherd, ends our friendship. Love comes from God. God is love. It touches us at every point of our lives. From the cradle to the grave, every moment of our lives we are the objects of love to some one, and we love in turn. But human love must end. After life's fitful dream, the cares and vanities, the vexations and pleasures of life have no terror or concern for us, the love that thrilled our whole being will return to the source from whence it came. But truth will never die. It is the "imperial virtue." The heart may fail; it will fail, and the hand fall listless by the side. The arrow will fall after being shot into the air and never return, and the bow will be broken; the altar will be thrown down; the sand, grain by grain, run through the hour-glass, and the glass be shattered; the eye grow dim; the world roll up as a scroll and pass away; the hills may crumble and the pyramids melt with fervent heat; all the friendships will die and the love return to the Father that begat it, but truth will stand. It is indeed the imperial and the imperishable virtue. There, above the chaos and the confusion of time, it will stand to warn men from the wrong, and beckon them to do right.

Despite the glamor of the world that secret societies propagate a secresy of men's actions at the expense of truth and justice, it can not obtain in a lodge of this order. No man ever took upon himself the vows and studied the underlying motives, and practiced the lessons of the order, but he becomes a better citizen. If he has become a good husband and father, he becomes better in his domestic relations. If he has been charitable before, he becomes more so now. Men's weaknesses he looks upon as human frailties, until time and sense teach him that frailties have degenerated into positive perversity of character and baseness of heart. He will condemn falsehood and hypocrisy wherever found.

The object of religious organizations is to make men better and fit them for the life immortal. The object of government and its laws is to make and protect good citizens and repress vice. The object of this secret organization is to bind men more firmly together for mutual protection, for help and sustenance, to look after their families, and to be in a broad sense our brother's keeper. I would not be understood as placing a secret organization in place of the church, or in the place of a political government. By no means. Each has its own proper and particular sphere of action. No one in its actions and endeavors is inimical to the actions of the others. Each rests on its own peculiar foundation, but all dovetail together, and all make a harmonious whole. The man who is a good Christian is better by being a good Odd-Fellow. If both a good Christian and a good Odd-Fellow, he comes nearer being the typical citizen. If man reveres the law of this order, he will have more devotion to his church, his home, his flag and his country. I have no fault to find with those who do not believe in uniting with a secret organization, but I do object to any man inveighing against the objects and purposes, the ends and aims, of our order when he knows nothing about it. I do not expect every man to belong to my church, for men in their constitution and mental make-up can not see alike theologically. But I do accord to every member of every church the hope of getting to heaven if he lives up to the teachings of this particular sect. I believe in justification by faith and good works, but I have no use for a man who decries this doctrine when he never exercised a particle of faith nor did a good deed in his life. And so I would say to any one who thinks he stands on some lofty pinnacle and scents danger to the family tie, or church, or state, or society, because of the existence of secret orders, that he thinks and talks of something he knows nothing about. If I should desire to draw comparisons, I could say truthfully that during the last year this order gave more in charity and benefits to its members in Illinois than any religious denomination in the state. Look around your own community and see if it be not so. Think of the widow with tear-stained cheek, from whose door the wolf has been kept, because the charitable hand of our order was upon her. Count the orphan children of members of our order who have had shoes put on their feet, clothes put on their backs and food in their mouths. Enumerate the sufferers on beds of anguish, racked with pain and scorched with fever, who have had the nightly vigil of Odd-Fellows to smooth their pillows, dampen their parched lips and moisten their feverish brows. Watch the funeral pageant with its long train of mourners, brothers, dropping the evergreen in the grave, and doing the last sad offices, and then croak no more that secret societies are baneful to our civilization. He who thus sustains and soothes and encourages will be reckoned as twice blessed in that day when the secrets of all hearts are disclosed, and men are rewarded according to the deeds done in the body.

"[*]Some years ago I stood out on the great plains this side of Denver. To the north, the south and the east was one vast stretch of plains, the eye interrupted only by the horizon. I turned and looked to the west, and clearly outlined in the distance was the chain of the Rocky Mountains--the backbone of the continent. There I saw Long's Peak, Pike's Peak, and the Spanish Peaks, as mighty sentinels--watch towers--that had served as landmarks to many a weary traveler on the Santa Fe trail. They stood as the manifestation of the might of an Omnipotent Power. So I turn to the record made by this order in the last eighty years, and find colossal sums of money--not hoarded, but collected to relieve humanity, to educate the orphan, to bury the dead and to befriend the widow. I see arising, as if by magic, asylums for our needy. I see a great host, one million strong, advancing, shoulder to shoulder, elbow touching elbow, all bent on deeds of mercy and acts of love. Are not these also mighty sentinels erected amid this surging, striving throng of humanity to serve to guide man in the road to a higher and better life? These peaks of the Rockies may crumble and pass away, but a force for good once set in motion never loses its force. It is eternal. To beautify, to strengthen, to adorn and to expand our order and more fully present its magnificence to the world, we have the department of Patriarchs Militant. It depicts as gallant a band as ever marched to the sound of martial music or deployed for battle. As the knights under Richard Couer de Leon or Peter the Hermit marched forth to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the hand of the infidel and guard its sacred entablatures, so will our chevaliers as bravely guard our ritual, our mystic rights, our honor, the honor of our mothers wives and sisters, as a sacred trust.

"And so our order moves forward to greater conquests. In the past it has worked marvels for humanity. May we not, for the future, predict better and more highly wrought out achievements? Humanity has been taken as it is and in the progress of refinement has been raised to a higher standard. It is the hand-maiden of civilization that works under even yoke for the best sides of humanity. While it does not displace or attempt to displace the church, it aids. It has friendship, love and truth as the three human graces, and clings to faith, hope and charity as the Christian virtues. It is now like the city that is set upon the hill. It can not be hid. Out upon a rocky point of the ocean's shore at Minot's ledge is a great light-house, erected by the fostering care of the government to protect the mariners on the high seas. Its great light swings around, now flashing on the land and now sending its rays far out across the billowy ocean. It is a grateful act of a great government. Many a bewildered seaman has caught its rays and sheared the prow of his ship further out to sea to avoid the dangerous shoals.

"So we, imitating the kind of example of the generous government, and measuring our acts by the example of the blessed Master, have erected a light-house here for the protection of humanity from its ills. Now it shines on us as mortals hastening to a final consummation of things; again it throws its beams out across the illimitable sea of hope, where sooner or later we all may ride, and by the light here given we may steer our bark into a haven of final rest. Today we are on the tempestuous ocean of life. We who feel that we are on the deck, let us throw the life-line and the life-preservers to him who is about to sink. Let us make this order even a greater light-house than our fathers ever dreamed of. It can be done, because it is so ordained. What God in his good providence orders can be, will be accomplished. With thankful hearts we have passed over more than three quarters of a century of existence as an organization. We are speeding onward to the century mark, and whether we remain to see its wonderful processes or not, humanity will be here demanding just what we have done in the past. Let us lay the work strong today and transmit it in higher forms, so that the end of the century of our existence as an order shall see better life, better hope and higher aspirations. Let the Subordinates, Patriarchs, Rebekahs and Chevaliers all form a cordon around the altar of our beloved order, where the fires shall never be extinguished while friendship, love and truth endures, and faith, hope and charity are necessities.

"Grand as has been the record of Odd-Fellowship from 1819 to the present, it is but the sunbeams from the birth of the day that will develop grandly into a magnificence that shall combine all the charms of the morning, the glare of the noontide, and the blaze of a sunset splendor in an endless panorama of glory and grandeur. And if, with such a picture before our eyes, painted by a faith founded upon the achievements of eighty years, and our intimate knowledge of the vast practical benevolence that begins at the cradle and ends only at the gate of heaven, the Odd-Fellow is not dazzled by the sublimity of Odd-Fellowship and awed into a reverence for its work and character, there is a lamentable defect in his appreciation of the beautiful, and an utter failure to read the joys and dignity and influence of a properly developed and appreciative Odd-Fellow. Let it never be forgotten that there is nothing groveling in Odd-Fellowship. Mutual relief, it is true, is a leading office in our affiliation, but Odd-Fellowship seeks to elevate the character of man, make him what God intended him to be; and while such a helpful influence is extended to each one of us who have chosen to come within its holy power, may we endeavor to lift ourselves up to the high standard of the order of which we are a part, faithfully discharging our duties to ourselves and to the world; shedding its benign influence and hallowed inspiration alike in the palace with its draped windows and velvet laden floors and in the cottage nestling among the flowers of the humble dooryard; glowing with the same peerless luster in halls of learning and in workshop and factory; kissing with the same tender, holy touch the rough hand that guides the implement of industry, and the soft hand that guides the pen; making character the test of merit and the heart the bond of friendship, and recognizing the equality and holy influence of noble womanhood. Odd-Fellowship is the unerring, resplendent guiding star to that grand development of human nature to which hope looks forward with such ardent joy, when one law shall bind all nations, tongues and kindred, and that law will be the law of universal brotherhood."

[*]Extract from address delivered by Hon. E. G. Hogate.