After all, what lives in this world?  Is it thought pulsations alone or deeds done?  If thought alone, then the lowest thought coordinated in the brain of man would live.  Something must be combined with thought in order to have a lasting effect.  There must be thought and deeds and sentiment.  Sentiment must go to the very existence of the race.  On these forces may be built up structures that live and breathe a benediction on all mankind.  I ask you to cast your eye over the world and note the permanency of such institutions as have come down to us, and are alive, and such as we say will live.  I venture your first question will be:  “What is the foundation on which they rest?  Why, through the slow, revolving years have these institutions lived and thrived and grown?  Have they lived on greed, or a desire for pelf or power, or out of human desire for adulation and praise?  Or have they lived because of man’s needs, and out of human wants?” If we probe to the bottom we will find this the corner-stone of all laudable ambitions, because man needs man, and needs help into a higher plane of usefulness and activities.

We find institutions coming down to us from a date which the memory of man runs not to the contrary; indeed, some so old that the musty volumes of the long ago reveal not their origin.  But simply the need of man for man would not entirely account for the duration of society in its ancient form.  There must be still other underlying principles.  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.  The little wild flower struggles through leafy mold, endures the tempestuous blast of winter, that when spring comes it may bloom to gladden the earth and scatter sweet incense all around.  But without the cementing influence that runs like a thread all through society, man would not, could not, cast a sweet odor even on his own life, and dying would leave no benediction on the lives of others.  And here the command comes, “Gather into thy quiver the lives and aspirations of others, that fitted to thy bow they may go forth scattering blessings by your help and by your kindly influence.”  So all great achievements have been based on great fundamental principles, and each principle has for its object the betterment of the conditions of mankind.