The membership coming to the Territory, and which, of course, formed the nuclei of churches, was a heterogenous compound.  In many respects there was no possible assimilation; but so far as the simple tenets of the primitive faith were concerned, there was little or no difference.  But as to plurality of bishops in the congregation, their tenure and jurisdiction of office, the relations of comity between sister churches, the duties and powers of an evangelist, the laying on of hands in induction into authority, instrumental music in the congregation, the Sunday-school and its organization, the order of social worship, the mid-week meeting for prayer, and numerous other matters of scriptural life, there were as many shades of opinion as there were of dialects; and the tenacity with which they were maintained, those not familiar with the time and its environments can hardly hope to know.  Yet upon all these and kindred questions, Bro.  Butler had singularly clear-cut and advanced opinions.  He has often said to me, “How very obtuse the churches seem to be on the plain teaching of Scripture.  And the preachers are equally ignorant, or else they are willing to go limping and halting, when they could as well and better be easily marching and leading their sanctified hosts to marvelous victory.”

He did not feel, or even make manifest, that he recognized his greatness in these directions only as he labored to bring the congregations and their officers up to his ideals.

In the first struggles to bring the scattered congregations into co-operative unity, he was the head and heart of the movement; and through all the varied successes and failures of those non-cohesive times and men, he never lost courage or intimated aught else than the success which now crowns the work.

I regarded him as the finest ecclesiastical historian among us, and because of his knowledge here, coupled with the philosophy that grew out of it, linked to the genius of Christianity itself, he was, by educational intuition, a missionary zealot.

Carey and the Judsons, and Barclay and Livingstone, with all others of like character, were what he termed “ripe fruit” from the Good Tree.  He was to the churches in Kansas what these men and women were to the people among whom they labored.  Visiting every outpost, gathering the straggling sheep into folds and striving to secure shepherds for them, stripping the fleecy garments from the wolves, uncovering the sophistries of the various polytheisms, immersing the converts and exhorting the saints, the thirty-five years he spent in Kansas were years of severest mental, moral and physical labor; and from which he asked no respite until God called him.

Truthfully this Scripture may be written as his epitaph:  “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth; Yea, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors and their works do follow them.”

CHAPTER XLII.