DEAR SIR:—­You say in letter before me, “It must, therefore, be distinctly understood that if we embark in a missionary enterprise in Kansas, this question of slavery and anti-slavery must be ignored.”  I respond:  This reformation is pledged before heaven and earth, and under covenants the most solemn and binding into which men can enter, to guarantee freedom of thought and speech to our brotherhood-i—­not indeed on subjects purely abstract, speculative and inoperative, but on Bible questions—­questions which involve the well-being of humanity.  This matter of slavery is a Bible question—­a question of justice between man and man—­of mercy and humanity.  It is what Jesus would call one of the weightier matters of the law, and demands, therefore, a large place in our investigations.

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The brethren here in Kansas have made no such stipulations with me They have left me to my own discretion in preaching the gospel to sinners, and teaching the saints according to the Bible.  They have shown themselves too magnanimous to impose on my conscience a restriction which their own manhood would forbid, under similar circumstances, that they should suffer to be imposed on themselves.

For myself, I will be no party, now or hereafter, to such an arrangement as that contemplated in your letter now before me.  I would not make this “Reformation of the nineteenth century” a withered and blasted trunk, scattered by the lightnings of heaven, because it took part with the rich and powerful against the poor and oppressed, and because we have been recreant to those maxims of free discussion which we have so ostentatiously heralded to the world as our cherished principles.

In explanation of the first letter received by Bro.  Butler from the corresponding secretary, a second one was sent, from which it is necessary to make the following extracts: 

I reply, that nothing has been said against teaching a master his duties according to the Bible, nor (what is just as important) against teaching servants their duties to their masters, according to the Bible—­according to the instructions given to evangelists—­I.  Tim. vi. 1-4.  My remarks, as the whole letter will show, had reference to the question of slavery in Kansas.  The forms it takes on there are very different from the duties masters owe their servants according to the Bible.  It is whether a slaveholder is necessarily a sinner, unfit for membership in the Christian Church—­a blood-thirsty oppressor, whose money is the “price of blood,” and would “pollute” the treasury of the Lord, etc. etc.  And, on the other hand, whether American slavery is a divine institution, the perfection of society for the African race, and essential to their happiness—­while all Abolitionists are fit only for the madhouse or the penitentiary.  These and such like are the forms the question of slavery assumes in Kansas, as well as in many of the free States, where there are no “masters and servants” in that sense to be taught their duties, in reference to which it was said the question must be entirely ignored.  And we can not consent that on one side or the other such pleas shall be made under the sanction of the American Christian Missionary Society.