If these churches are not able at the present time to exhibit a growth adequate to their opportunities, it must be remembered, on their behalf, that they have sent to the West an incredibly large number of disciples to serve as the nuclei for other churches throughout that mighty empire that within the past thirty years has grown up between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean.

The days I spent in these churches are the golden days of my life.  There has been no field in which my labor as an evangelist has yielded a richer harvest; none in which there have been bestowed on me more flattering or more kindly attentions.  It was the bright and joyous sunshine of a spring morning, before the bursting of the storm.

Though each year increased my attachment to the people, and apparently added their good-will to myself, there had been coming to the front a difficulty that could not any longer be thrust aside or disregarded.  I was one hundred and fifty miles away from home, and from my wife and children.  On holding a council of war to consider our future tactics, in which Mrs. Butler, was commander-in-chief, and myself, second in command, she said to me, “Pardee, I am willing to go wherever you say, only when we go there we must go to stay.  We must not put our house on wheels.  We must not leave our children without settled employment, exposed to all the hazards of a city life, or a life without a permanent habitation.”

Under such circumstances the settling on a home in reference to which it could be said, “Here we are to stay,” was not an easy matter.  The people of the Military Tract were, almost all of them, Kentuckians.  There were evidently impending storms in the political horizon.  I could not bend my sails to suit every favoring gale; and if, in the future, there should come a time that my conscience should lie in one direction, and my popularity and pecuniary interest in the other, I did not like to invite such a temptation.  At any rate, I did not like to place myself in such a position that to bring down on my head popular odium would be to invite pecuniary ruin.  These counties in the Military Tract were old settled counties, and land was high; and I was not rich.  At this time the Kansas-Nebraska bill had been adopted by Congress, and Kansas had been opened for settlement.  It was certain that Eastern Kansas, in the matter of fertility of soil, and all the elements of agricultural wealth, would be a desirable location.

“But there might be a political and social conflict.”  Yes, and there might be a political and social conflict in Illinois; or, for the matter of that, it might cover the West as with a blanket.  It was certain that Eastern Kansas would be early settled from Missouri; and in no State was there a larger percentage of the people known as Disciples.  I would, therefore, be among my brethren; and, if I had kept the peace for three years with Kentuckians in Illinois, could I not do the same thing with Missourians in Kansas?  In any case, there was a fair prospect of gaining in Kansas a position of pecuniary independence; and any man can see that such a position was worth all the world to Alexander Campbell, when he was constrained by his conscience to bring down on his own head the utmost wrath of his Baptist brethren.