Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 352 pages of information about Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler.

Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 352 pages of information about Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler.
impressions made on my mind during a five months’ tour in Northern Ohio, after an absence of nine years.  There must and will be a reform; it has become a public necessity.  Temporizers are proverbially short-sighted.  God gives only to the pure-hearted the divine privilege of foreseeing the coming of those beneficent revolutions, which exalt and dignify humanity.  Ambitious and selfish men are left to go blindly on and fall into their own pit.  At present there will be chaos I The people will not follow those who have been accustomed to lead, notwithstanding those leaders will have power greatly to embarrass the action of those who do not follow them.  We have three pressing wants:  1.  A sustained paper that will not bow the knee to the image of this modern Baal.  Such a paper we have, but it should not be concealed, that it must pass through a fiery ordeal, and can only be sustained by the timely efforts of its friends. 2.  We need a convention made up of men who regard slavery as a moral evil, and are disposed to make their own consciences the rule of their action. 3.  We need a missionary fund, which shall be placed in such hands that it shall not be prostituted to the vile purpose of bribing men into silence on the subject of slavery.

I am not commissioned specially to speak for the Luminary, nor to prophesy concerning any convention which may hereafter assemble.  I only speak for myself.  Let it then be candidly admitted that the fund which I have been able to collect is a rather unpromising beginning, and that it does not augur that this mission will be well sustained.  I remark, then, I never was adequately sustained.  I have been a frontier and a pioneer preacher, and have shared the fortunes of such men.  To keep myself in the field I have labored very hard, I have toiled by day, and have subjected my family to the necessity of such labor, privation, and close economy as, perhaps, calls for rebuke instead of praise.  The churches at Davenport, Long Grove, De Witt, Marion, and Highland Grove, in Iowa; and Camp Point, Mt.  Sterling, and Rushville, in Illinois, can be addressed as to my former manner of life.  I would speak modestly of myself; and have not obtruded these matters before the brethren until rudely assailed as though I never made any sacrifices.  I do not complain, and what I have said is offered, as evidence, in some sort, that money appropriated to this mission will not be squandered.

In this connection it is thought proper to insert a single quotation from a letter which appeared in the Review, a paper which published editorially, the most unscrupulous slanders in reference to Bro.  Butler’s work in Kansas, which letter was written by Bro.  S. A. Marshall, of Leavenworth—­both an M. D. and a preacher, and than whom no more honorable gentleman ever lived in that city.  His testimony is incidental, and therefore so much the stronger: 

The brethren of the four churches named have tried to co-operate together to sustain Bro.  Pardee Butler as home missionary for a little while.  He is an able evangelist and generally beloved:  and being on the ground and well acquainted with the country, and the manners and customs of the people, could be obtained at much less expense, and perhaps be as useful and acceptable to the people as any other available evangelist.

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Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.