WHEREAS, Bro.  Butler has faithfully and diligently performed the labor assigned him as our evangelist; therefore,

Resolved, I. That we do most heartily approve of his labors and general course of conduct during his term of service. 2.  That the officers of this Board be directed to procure the services of Bro.  Butler, or some other suitable person, to solicit aid in the States for this society.

Bro.  Humber, as president of the Board, did not call it together to complete the arrangement contemplated.  On my own part, I felt unwilling to importune him.  I went on my tour, therefore, simply under the indorsement and approval of my own congregation.  I left home December 16, 1858, and returned May 12, 1859.  I visited the Military Tract of Illinois, Northeast Iowa, Southwest Michigan, Central and Eastern Indiana, and Northern Ohio.  The amount of money realized was $365; expenses, $110, leaving a balance on hand of $255, as the first installment of the fund of our begun mission.

Of all the churches in which I sought a hearing only one, the church at Bedford, Ohio, gave me the cold shoulder.  In response to my request for the privilege of delivering a lecture before them, in development of our wants and condition in Kansas, they responded that they considered it “political,” and they had resolved that their house should not be used for political lectures!....  In all the localities visited by me, I found the masses of the people with such convictions as will constrain them to treat slavery in the United States as a moral evil, and to patronize only such societies as assume toward it a similar position.  It is asked:  What have we to do with slavery?  I reply:  We, as Christians, should have nothing to do with it.  But we in Kansas are placed under compulsion to have something to do with it.  We have slaveholders in our churches; and if the time should come when there will be no slaves in Kansas, still we have something to do with it, for within one day’s ride of us in Platte county, Mo., is the largest body of slaveholders in that State.  Discipline is special to each congregation, but that sense of justice which always stands as the basis of discipline, is common to all the churches of one communion.  This public opinion is created by a mutual interchange of sentiment—­the books we read and the preachers we hear.  For years past slaveholders have ceased to hear those suspected of abolitionism or to read their writings.  I will bear very long with error where mutual discussion and free interchange of sentiment promise ultimately to bring all to be of the same mind.  Am I told that the safety of slave property requires that Abolitionists should not be heard in the slave States?  I reply:  The more shame to those who perpetuate an institution that demands for its security the tyranny of such proscription; and that the human soul of the black man should be so cruelly dwarfed and robbed of his manhood. . . .  Such are the not very flattering