W. Bion Adkins

“ We can accomplish our task only as in burning earnestness we give ourselves. What depth of humiliation, what self-devotion, what unmeasured sacrifices, what unspeakable suffering, what unfathomable anguish, what toil and anxiety, what love and pity, what loneliness and sorrow, are crowded into those three words, "He gave himself."
If we as an order would give ourselves to the principles taught by our institution, we could win the world in the next half century. If we are to be truest to the future, we must stand by the side of the Great Teacher and proclaim a complete and perfect truth. ”

“ 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.
This world is beautiful, and it is full of priceless sympathies. All creation is glorious with melody. The morning stars, saith the Bible, sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy when it was made. The universe of stars, and suns, and planets and globes, swing harmoniously through space. Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Father's notice; not a soul yearns, or sorrows, or rejoices, but He knoweth it. ”

“ The Bible is the book of God, and therefore it is the book of the future, the book of hope. It pierces the veil between this and another life, pointing us on to the realms of light. In sorrow, in sin, and in death we may, if we will, find in the Holy Bible patience, consolation and hope. The Bible opens the widest, freest outlook for the mind into the eternal, enlarging a man's range of spiritual sight, and enabling him to judge of all things in both worlds in their true proportion. The Bible gets into life because it first came out of life. ”

“ It is but a small part that we should perform our mystic rights, typifying friendship, love and truth, but that we should so live them and act them that the touch of a member is the touch of a brother whose words sweeten the asperities of life and whose last offering is a tribute at the grave. We may be rudely brought back to the world with its pomp and show, its pageantry and vanity, by an emblem of mortality presented to us, but should we not ever have the spectre of mortality before our eyes? In the mad rush through life we forget the kinship of man to man. ”

“ It teaches us that we are in a world full of temptations, sin and sorrow. We see the emblems of decay all around us. The strong man of today may stand forth, nerved for toil, with all the bloom of health mantling cheek and brow, seemingly as strong and vigorous as the mighty oak, and yet tomorrow he will fade as the autumn leaf. Then he realizes how foolish it is to be vain; thinks of the instability of wealth and power, and the certain decay of all earthly greatness. Odd-Fellowship teaches us that charity springs from the heart, is not puffed up, seeks not its own. ”

“ Unless the principles that are laid down are fully carried out, we can never be Odd-Fellows in spirit and in truth. Today is our opportunity; act now. Have you ever seen those marble statues fashioned into a fountain, with the clear water flowing out from the marble lips or the hand, on and on forever? The marble stands there, passive, cold, making no effort to arrest the gliding water. So it is that time flows through the hands of men, swift, never pausing until it has run itself out, and the man seems petrified into a marble sleep, not feeling what it is that is passing away forever. ”

“ Its sorrows and its anguishes have I often witnessed, but into that pool of Bethesida of the world's anguish, with healing do I see ever come an angel, a pitying woman. The influence of wife and mother is ever near me; their faces are the most lovely; their hearts the most tender of all in this world—my mother and my wife. And for their sake, and for the sake of all the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, whom I daily meet doing good, I long and I earnestly yearn for the eloquence and grace to half express the thoughts that rise within me of what the world owes woman. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Love obliterates the differences in education, wealth, station, religion, politics and nationality. It is a promoter of peace and harmony; it cultivates the social graces; it makes friends of strangers and brothers of acquaintances; it softens the asperities of life; it worships at the shrine of piety, and recognizes the omnipotence of God and the immortality of man. It is religious not sectarian, patriotic but not partisan. It glows by the fireside, radiant with perpetual joy. It glorifies God in worship and in song. It blesses humanity in genial mirth and human sympathies. ”

“ There must be love and the acknowledgment of the brotherhood of man all along the way of life, or the family would go to ruin, society would dissolve, citizenship would not exist, states and principalities, kingdoms and powers would exist only as an idea in the brain. There would be no command to be our brother's keeper, no plighted vow that "The Lord be between thee and me, and between my seed and thy seed forever." Man would, as an individual, stand absolutely alone, like an atom dropped from the abyssmal depths onto this earth of ours. ”

“ And should he fall a victim to disease, the brothers of charity will be there to close his eyes, and with solemn, yet hopeful, heaven-born rites, consign his body to the repose of the silent tomb. Odd-Fellowship is an embodiment of family love and affection, and is the only substitute for home influence, and the only green spot in the dreary waste of life which binds these brothers to the tender practice of every virtue—guides in prosperity and health, and as a ministering angel bends over them with tenderest pity in their chamber of suffering. ”

“ When a lady plays, and a gentleman stands near her, and does not turn for her the pages of the music book, it is her husband; when you see his fingers in eager readiness to turn the leaf, it is not her husband."
There is in every true woman a spark of divinity, which glows in her heart, and blazes into a most luminous light when a husband's love and respect and sympathy and appreciation and encouragement fan that spark into activity. But woe to the home where cruel hands quench that flame. The sun is the heater and illuminator of our whole solar system. ”

“ Each day some pearl drops from the jeweled thread of friendship—some harp to which we have listened has been hushed forever. Love, however, annihilates death even; blots away all record of time and creates the world it lives in; conjures back arms to embrace, lips to kiss, and eyes to smile, whispers its own praises and breathes its own names of endearment. Thus, love maketh the light to our dreams and planteth hope in the midst of our sorrow. In darkness and in danger, too, love cometh to us ever, ever, now warning, now chiding, now blessing, and always safely guarding. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The architectonic principle of life is not the momentum that sweeps down to us from the years that have been, but the ideal that lies deep in the years that are yet to be. This is the mysterious, occult power that moulds, forms and fashions our stature, and that is determining the greatness or the littleness of our destiny. And not only is the future architectonic, it is also an inspiration and refuge for our anxieties, defeats and inadequacy, his incompetency, how little he has achieved, realizes his inconsequence and insignificance, and he looks forward and sees triumph in tomorrow ”

“ Then as we may best show our love to Him by loving one another, is it not well that we commence loving those around us at once? Ah! yes, and like the ambitious vine, do thou reach out all thy tendril thoughts to what is nearest, the while aspiring to the oak or the pine of the loftier trust, even the faith of Abraham that was accounted unto him for righteousness. Would I had some new phrase for love, some new figure for hope! How lonely and weary must that life be without love, how tasteless all its joys, and how vacant every scene. If we have the spirit of love we will live for others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How a common sorrow or calamity spans the widest social differences and welds all, the rich and poor, in one common bond of sympathy, which, begetting charity and all her train, softens the hardest heart and banishes the sturdiest feeling of superiority! Over the lifeless body of the departed, enemies and friend can weep together, and, burying strife and differences with their common loss, feel a kinship which unites them, and which all humanity shares. ”

“ We have riches untold. We have institutions for the care of the old, and the orphan, the equal of any of which the world can boast. We have a grasp on the sympathy and confidence of the masses which is immeasurable. We stand for principles that are the incarnation of God's infinite thought and throbbing love. We are equipped for conquest. What answer shall the force make to the cry from the field? As loyal Odd-Fellows, let us take our answer from the Great Commander. What answer did He make to a dying world? What did he come to do? He came to lift fallen humanity. ”

“ To the rich and the poor, the old and the young, at all times, comes the rich, sweet melody of this song of humanity to comfort and to cheer. For eighty years the light of Odd-Fellowship has burned before the world, a beacon to the lost, a comfort to the wanderer and a protection to the thoughtless. Eighty years of work for humanity's sake; eighty years devoted to teaching men to love mankind; eighty years of earnest labor, consecrated by friendship, cemented with love and beautified by truth. ”

“ O, happy fault! that has shown the world the mines of rich affection of woman's heart, that else would never have been discovered. O, happy fault, that has shown the world a wealth of woman's nature, her capability for love, the radiance of her tenderness, her infinite pity, her unswerving devotion, the solace of her presence in sickness and sorrow, the depth and sweetness of her mercy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Brothers, I wish you great joy. Live in the constant sense of the Heavenly Father's loving presence, and of nature's veracity and friendly intention. Distrust all doctrines, all opinions and all ways of living that destroy manly joyousness. Never lose sight of the fact that a noble life is a truthful life. Truth is a trust. He who has discovered any portion of useful truth has something in trust for mankind. God is the author of truth, and when man seeks this imperial virtue and acquires it, he is in possession of great power. ”

“ If their intention is some day to take unto their care and keeping a woman's life and happiness, to pluck from out a comfortable and contented home, and from the embrace of devoted parents, a pure and happy and trusting young woman, who has never felt the wrench and shock of life's storms, nor the cold shoulder of neglect, nor the gnawing tooth of want, then let them see to it in time that they may bring to her a heart as pure and mind as uncorrupted, and character as unpolluted as they expect from her. ”

“ I know of no man who can speak or write with such ability. I do not believe that any of you could compose such narratives, or could have laid down such sublime moral laws, so simple, yet so elevating, exerting so wide an influence for good, and awakening such deep and such reverential feelings, as does the Bible." Diderat spoke the truth. Place the most celebrated systems of philosophies or the most famous code of ethics, into the hands of the masses, and see whether the subtleties of their learning, the elegance of their diction will touch their hearts as deeply as does the Bible. ”

“ The sculptor fashions from the marble a form of surpassing loveliness, its lines are those of grace and beauty. We stand before it charmed, whispering our admiration, but the impression on the heart is only passing. The poet sings of home, of mother and of love; the meter may be faulty and the words may charm not, but the sentiment is true and touches our hearts. The experience it recites is common to humanity, and wherever its sweet tones are heard it softens men's natures and makes them better, truer and nobler. ”