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Quotes from Rev. E. R. Dillie D.D. Grand Chaplain (True Fellowship Lodge 52)

What constitutes the supremacy of the 19th Century over all former centuries. Our journalists, orators, and historians call this the crowning century of time. But in what realm lies its supremacy?

Not in education, for our schools produce no scholars equal to Plato or his great teacher, Socrates; not in oratory, for our orators still ponder as their masterpieces and models the periods of the “Oration on the Crown;” not in sculpture or architecture, for the broken fragments of a Paridas or an Angelo are still the models of the plastic art, and at once the administration and despair of artists; not in literature, for this century has produced no Homer or Shakespeare.

Humanity, social sympathy, altruism, brotherhood, are the glory of our age. The application of love to the various departments of human life furnishes the historian with the milestones by which to measure human progress.

Eighty years ago, American Odd Fellowship was born. That sum of years in the individual marks senility and approaching decay, but to an Institution like ours, founded on eternal principles, and destined to be as enduring as the race, those years but mark the period of its infancy, and leave the dew of youth on its brow.

American Odd Fellowship is an evolution from the old English Unity. In the latter part of the 18th Century Lodges or Guilds of mechanics existed in London calling themselves “Ancient and Honorable Odd Fellows”. These Lodges were at first entirely of a beneficial and convivial character. It was customary for each member to pay a penny a week for the relief of the poor among them; and this was the humble origin of our present system of beneficence and relief which stands unequalled in its perfect adaptation to its purpose. The early Lodges were convivial. In the year 1788 the great poet Jjames Montgomery wrote an ode for a Lodge in London, one verse of which I quoate:

When Friendship, Love, and Truth abound, Among a band of ….

Another verse of a refrain current in those days was still more bacchanalian:

Then let us be social…

Gradually this very objectionable feature passed away. In 1813 that element of the Order which favored the abolition of all convivaility in meetings being largely in the majority reorganized the fraternity under the name of ‘Independent Order of Odd Fellows,” now known as the ‘Manchester Unity’. Thus the “I” in the familar legend ‘I.O.O.F’ is a badge of which we may well be proud; for it commemorates a distinct step in advance on the part of our Order, which has moved ever upwards to higher standards and ideals until today no saloonkeeper nor vendor of spiritous liquors can enter our Lodges.

American Odd Fellowship owes its origin to Thomas Wildey, a blacksmith by trade, who, with four other mechanics, instituted at Baltimore, April 26, 1819, Washington Lodge No. 1, which soon after procured a charter from the Manchester Unity as the Grand Lodge of Maryland and the United States. Looking back over those four score years we may well say: ‘What hath God wrought!’

Young as our Order is it has not always had smooth seas and favoring gales. On the one hand a political demagog has not attacked it; on the other religious intolerance has assailed it. But the arrows of the bigoted opposers fell harmless at its feet. Its enemies could not pluck from its brow the garlands placed there by the men it had made nobler, the widows it had befriended, and the orphans it had relieved. The clamor of their hate did not sound as loud in the ears of God or man as the prayers that rose like incense from the homes of sorrow, and from the couches of pain, for our beloved Brotherhood. When it was reviled it reviled not again. It went meekly about doing good, answering all invective as did one of old: ‘I have done many good works among you; for which of these do you stone me?’

Our fraternity has been charged with godlessness. Godlessness? Yes, it was, and is, if unselfish devotion to the causes of humanity, if warfare against vice and immorality in all its forms,