of all. There is a difference between
trying to please and giving pleasure. Give pleasure. Lose no chance
of giving pleasure. For that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of
a truly loving spirit. I shall pass through this world but once. Any
good things that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human
being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I
shall not pass this way again. We can be Odd-Fellows only while we act
like honest men."

Every Odd-Fellow ought to be a "gentleman." Do you know the meaning of
the word "gentleman"? "It means a gentleman--a man who does things
gently, with love. And that is the whole art and mystery of it. The
gentleman can not in the nature of things do an ungentle, an
ungentlemanly thing." "Love doth not behave itself unseemly." Life is
full of opportunities for learning love. Every man and woman every day
has a thousand of them. There is an eternal lesson for us all, "how
better we can love." What makes a good artist, a good sculptor, a good
musician? Practice. What makes a man a good man, a man of love?
Practice. Nothing else. If a man does not exercise his arm he
develops no biceps muscle; and if a man does not exercise his soul, he
acquires no muscle in his soul, no strength of character, no vigor of
moral fibre, nor beauty of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of
enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression
of the whole round Christian character--the Christ-like nature in its
fullest development. And the constituents of this great character are
only to be built up by ceaseless practice. To love abundantly is to
live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever. We want to
live forever for the same reason that we want to live tomorrow. Why do
you want to live tomorrow? It is because there is some one who loves
you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love back.
There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and
are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love him that he commits
suicide. The reason why, in the nature of things, love should be the
supreme thing--because it is going to last; because in the nature of
things it is an eternal life. It is a thing that we are living now,
not that we get when we die; that we shall have a poor chance of
getting when we die unless we are living now.

No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and gr