No matter how harshly he might speak of an opponent, or wrong-doer, he would often turn right around and do him a kindness.

One of the men who helped to raft him wrote to him three or four years ago, saying that he was writing an account of the Kansas troubles, and asking him for some information on points that he had forgotten.  Father readily complied with his request, telling him that he freely forgave him, and all the rest of his old-time enemies.

Father was always ready to help the poor, the oppressed, or unfortunate.  It was that spirit of sympathy for the weaker party that led him to side with Horace Greely in 1872, because he thought the Republicans were too hard on the conquered Southerners.  But when he heard of the widespread Ku-Klux outrages, he concluded that he had been mistaken, and returned heartily to the Republican party.

I heard a neighbor say a few years ago:  “If any one needs help, just go to Bro.  Butler.  I never heard of him refusing to help anybody that was in trouble, no matter how much time or trouble it cost him.”

Another neighbor had his house burned.  He was old and feeble, and unable to rebuild.  Other neighbors thought they had done their part when they raised a subscription to build him a new house.  But cold weather was coming on, necessitating haste.  Father, not content with giving money, looked after buying materials, and putting up the building; sent his teams to do the hauling; and, because the ground was freezing up, worked until late at night, digging out sand to plaster it.  And this was but one of the many instances of his practical kind-heartedness.

He attended the State Meeting at Hutchinson about a year before his death, where he had been invited to deliver a historical address, sketching his own life and work, and the history of our churches in Kansas.  He was urgently requested to publish it, and from that circumstance came the publication, in the Christian Standard, of his “Recollections.”

Bro.  F. M. Rains said of that address, “That was the grandest speech ever delivered on Kansas soil.”

The Hutchinson Daily News spoke of it as follows: 

“The address was a happy blending of church history, and personal reminiscence, full of fact, humor and pathos, and, most of all, devotion to freedom, morality, temperance, and godliness.  Few people of today are able to appreciate the privations, and sacrifices, and dangers, with which the pioneer was beset, and these dangers came with special nearness to the man whose mission, courage and conscience made him the open and avowed foe of all sorts of wickedness.  The house was packed with intense listeners, and from beginning to end he held the great audience in close attention, and when he finished, the hope that grand old Pardee Butler might live a hundred years was the unexpressed wish of all.”