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, never was the field of human observation so unobstructed and expanded, nor the ascertainment and sifting of facts so facile.  Never were opinions more diverse, nor was it ever so obviously important to detect and assert the philosophical principle, in recognition and obedience to which the laws of human government may be preserved and kept in view, and the retrocession of mankind prevented.  At no stage of history was it more important to call to mind the great principle that government is a means, and not an end, and is instituted to maintain those general liberties which are essential for human happiness and progress.  At this time, Odd-Fellowship looks toward the future with longing eyes, and its followers lift high their banner, on which is inscribed that beautiful motto, “Friendship, Love and Truth.”