Weekly journal-miner., 1909-12-08
ELKS PAY TRIBUTE
 TO THE DEPARTED
From Tuesdays Daily)

sail.
 Death. that levels all rank and that lays the shepherds staff by the side of the scepter of the king, when it strikes a brother silences his voice forever. The stricken can no longer plead for themselves and it must depend that their kind and loving friends. who remain, to seel that justice is done to their lives and that their noble deeds and generous acts shall not be entirely forgotten
 "Death," said one of the world $ wisest men, "hath this also; that il openeth the gate to good fame and extinguisheth envy,' and "that to praise the dead is highly proper, for only after a man is dead will the score of destiny be made even and as in life man is criticised, there. | fore, in death, man should be eulog- ized"
 Moreover, in the midst of our daily duties, duties that must be per | formed, in order that we, the living, may earn a subsistence we are, more or less, prone to forget, in recurring years, those who have passed into the dim and dusk of eternity and these memorial days serve as a monitor, not only to teach us what shadows we are and what shadows we shall soon become, but also afford us an opportunity to reflect on the beauty of the lives ofs those departed and to renew our own courage by re- membering how well they fought life's battle and life is a battle. no matter in what field we may labor; and the soul will never rest until it rests with God.
 The burden in life, of many a per son, is far greater than others know. | Many a man and many a woman, who smiles. nevertheless carries an ach- ing heart. Many a soul has seemed gay when sorrow was crushing it and many a person, in mental an gulsh, has fallen into some indiscre- tion that called forth much criti- cism from those who did not know the circumstances! ...
 Therefore, the message I bring to you today is: Eulogize the dead, also eulogize the living. It is a noble thing to eulogize the dead.
 It is nobler thing to eulogize the FStoried urn or animated bust, l Storied urn or animated bust,
 Back to its mansion, cannot call
 the fieeting breath.
 Honor's voice cannot provoke the silent dust
 Nor fiattery soothe. the dull, cold
 ear of death.'
 But kind words spoken of the liv- | ing, while yet the heart is warm, are sweater than the honey of Paradise.
 If you see a man or woman earn estly striving to do the right and amidst difficulties, trying to perform | his life's duties. speak words of praise and encouragement to him or ! them. Don't wait to chisle it in his tombstone. Flowers east upon the grave add no fragrance to life s pathway.
 There is a beautiful maxim, better | expressed in the Latin than in the translation: ''De mortius nil nisi bonum "-of the dead speak nothing but good. It sometimes appears as if we had twisted and perverted that beautiful motto into another shameless one which reads: "Speak good of nobody but the dead" ]"
 The life of a human being is so relatively short, so incomplete that, sometimes, it appears, simply to be the flash of a frefy at night. In a the flash of a fre-fy at night. In a on the headstone of a little child, appears the following pathetic and significant epitaph:
 ct seems so soon that I was
 done for,
 That I wonder what I was
 begun for.'
 A celebrated American orator once speaking upon an occasion similar to this said:
 "Every man is the center of a circle whose fatal circumference he cannot pass, within its narrow con- fines he is potential, but beyond it he perishes, and if the hope of i'm mortality be a splendid but delusive dream there he who dreads to die should fear to live, for life would be a tragedy darker and more desol- ate than death.'
 No man ever solved the riddle Of existence. No mortal man ever will solve it. Whoever shall solve it, will have ceased to be mortal and will have become immortal and super human. From that time in the mists of antiquity when mankind first viewed the heavens down to the present time, we have wondered whence we came and whither we go Philosophers have disputed ,astrono- mers, mathematicians, poets, orators, statesmen, physicians and magicians have theorized, written, yearned and imagined, and insofar as human knowledge and human investigation are concerned, in the discussion of the question, we always end where we begin. We talk of the categories of time, space and eternity, but no man can conceive of them. We pronounce the word "Infnity' but when we attempt to define it, the intellect sprawls helplessly! The mystery of existence, of chaos, of the primordial and of the fnality, was the mystery of the past, is the mystery of today and will continue to be the mystery of the future. It is immutable, unfathomable! The brain will never answer any of these questions. The heart at times seems | to. We know very little, but have