He is to be the accepted Lord and law-giver in every realm of
human thought and activity. He is to rule in the family. He is to
rule in business. He is to rule until the demon of hate, malice and
injustice has been throttled. He must rule in the affairs of state.
He must rule in society, until the watchers at the gate shall announce
to Him who sitteth upon the throne: "Thy kingdom has come and thy will
is done in earth as it is in heaven." Christ is the solution of man's
most difficult problems. He came to save men. How did He go about the
task? He gave himself. 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. Our platform should
be neither broader nor narrower than His. If there is one truth in
revelation that we can not give its proper setting and due emphasis,
then we are not the keepers of God's truth. To my thinking, there are
no organizations formed by man that can appeal more confidently to the
Word 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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