Again, if I were alone there would be no need of law, because both good and bad would be represented in my personality.  There could be no murder, no crime, no punishment; but with all the manifold people with different tendencies, there must be law, or the social fabric would go to pieces by the strong trampling on the weak.  Hence I must stand with reference to the law on the right side or the wrong side, and all humanity regardful 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.