and right. Why should such a man falter in his course? He may be
slandered, he may be deserted by the world, but he has that within him
which will keep him erect, and enable him to move onward in his course,
with his eyes fixed on heaven, which he knows will not desert him.

Odd-Fellowship teaches its members to be men of honor. When I say
honest, I use it in its larger sense of discharging all your duties,
both public and private, both open and secret, with the most
scrupulous, heaven-attesting integrity; in that sense, farther, which
drives from the bosom all little, dark, crooked, sordid, debasing
considerations of self, and substitutes in their place a bolder,
loftier and nobler spirit, one that will dispose you to consider
yourselves as born not so much for yourselves as for your country and
your fellow-creatures, and which will lead you to act on every occasion
sincerely, justly, generously and magnanimously. There is a morality
on a larger scale, perfectly consistent with a just attention to your
own affairs, which it would be folly to neglect; a generous expansion,
a proud elevation and conscious greatness of character, which is the
best preparation for a decided course in every situation into which you
can be thrown; and it is to this high and noble tone of character that
I would have you to aspire. I would not have you to resemble those
weak and meagre streamlets, which lose their direction at every petty
impediment that presents itself, and stop and turn back, and creep
around, and search out every channel through which they may wind their
feeble and sickly course. Nor yet would I have you resemble the
headlong torrent that carries havoc in its mad career; but I would have
you like the ocean, that noblest emblem of majestic decision, which in
the calmest hour still heaves its resistless might of waters to the
shore, filling the heavens day and night with the echoes of its sublime
declaration of independence, and tossing and sporting on its bed with