Why do you want to live tomorrow?  It is because there is some one who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love back.  There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved.  It is when a man has no one to love him that he commits suicide.  The reason why, in the nature of things, love should be the supreme thing—­because it is going to last; because in the nature of things it is an eternal life.  It is a thing that we are living now, not that we get when we die; that we shall have a poor chance of getting when we die unless we are living now.

No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and grow old alone, unloving and unloved.  At any cost cultivate a loving nature.  Then you will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.  As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those around about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life.  I have seen almost all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed almost every pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look back I see standing out above all the life that has gone, four or five short experiences when the love of God reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the things which alone of all one’s life abide.  Everything else in all our lives is transitory.  Every other good is visionary.  But the acts of love which no man knows about, or can ever know about—­they fail not.

Odd-Fellowship ought to grow.  The kinship of the human race—­how beautiful a thought!  Without mutual aid the race would perish.  Think of it.  Throughout life you are dependent upon your fellow-man.  Who can live without a friend?  When you have no money and no home, where, brothers, will you find food and shelter?  When low with fever, the tongue parched, the brain wandering, who will give you water, bathe your throbbing temples, and watch over you lest you die?  See the old man.  The frosts of seventy winters have whitened his head; his eye is dim; his limbs tremble; reason and memory fail; he is an infant again.  He goes down to the valley of the shadow of death.  Who shall lead him and comfort his weary soul?  Who lay his body gently and reverently in the grave, and sod it over with green grass?  So with us all.  A man alone in the world, without a human being who cares whether he live or die!  Not a hand to touch, nor a voice to hear, nor a smile to receive!  Human affections forever sealed to him; no fireside; no home with father, mother, brothers, sisters; no little children, no son to be proud of; no daughters to caress; no “good night;” no “good morning.”  Who could bear it?  The sun could not warm such a man.  The brightest days and the greenest fields could not give him pleasure.  Better chain him on a rock in mid-ocean and leave him to the vultures, than thus rob him of his kinship with the human race.