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.