Part 24 (1/2)
The earnestness and appropriateness of his prayers were most noticeable on several funeral occasions, and numbers spoke of being affected by them, particularly at Bro. Locker's funeral.
He preached his last sermon at North Cedar, a week and a half before his accident. The following Sat.u.r.day, September 15, he attended Bro.
Locker's funeral. The next day he attended Bro. Parker's meeting at Pleasant Grove, where he presided at the Lord's table.
He had several appointments ahead at the time he was hurt. One of these was to preach the funeral of his old friend, Caleb May, who had died in Florida, August 27. His children in Florida had sent a request to his son, E. E. May, of Farmington, that father should preach a memorial sermon at Pardee.
Father had not done any heavy work for two years, but he still did much light work, and choring, although his health was gradually failing, milking eight or ten cows a day, and driving a young team from ten to twenty miles to his appointments, almost every Sunday, seldom stopping for bad weather.
It was reported that he was thrown from a colt at the time he was hurt. My brothers wish that report corrected. They think he never was thrown from a horse in his life. They had seen him break many colts, and had never seen him thrown. He had been using the most spirited colt on the place for his riding horse all summer; but that day, September 19, it was in a distant pasture, and finding my brother Charley's colt in the stable, he thought he would ride it to the post-office. It would not stand for him to mount, and he put the halter around a post, holding the end in his hand. As he mounted the saddle the colt jerked both halter and bridle from his hand and trotted off. Unable to reach the bridle he hastily dismounted. As he swung his right foot around to the ground the colt kicked it, crus.h.i.+ng the ankle joint. He quietly called mother; and Brother May, who happened to be pa.s.sing, helped him into the house, and sent for a surgeon.
We feared no worse result at the first than a crippled ankle. He said to Bro. White, who visited him a _few_ days after he was hurt, ”Oh, I will get up all right; a Butler never was conquered, you know. My only concern is that I shall not become a permanent cripple.”
The first week he was hopeful, though suffering much pain. The second week he was delirious, with high fever. Then he was prostrated with a severe nervous chill--his already over-wrought nervous system was exhausted by pain. From that time he lay in an unconscious stupor the greater part of the time. He pa.s.sed quietly away at half-past three A.
M., October 19, 1888, at the age of seventy-two.
His funeral took place the following day in the church at Pardee. The services were conducted by Elders John Boggs, of Clyde, and J. B.
McCleery, of Fort Leavenworth. The house was full, notwithstanding it was a stormy day, raining continuously from morning until night. Word had been sent to all the churches in this and adjacent counties, and hundreds who were preparing to attend the funeral were disappointed by the inclement weather.
CHAPTER XL.
PRO-SLAVERY HINDRANCES.
BY ELDER JOHN BOGGS.
Although our dear departed brother, Elder Pardee Butler, was never cla.s.sed with the Garrisonian Abolitionists, he began his ministerial life when the demands of the South were being felt in all the North, both in church and State. If slavery could not be advocated by the Northern conscience it must at least be ignored by all candidates for popular favor. It had divided some of the most popular religious denominations; and was the most exciting subject of discussion known to the religious world at the middle of the present century. Among the Disciples of Christ the slavery question was peculiarly perplexing, as there was a large per cent, of the members.h.i.+p who were actual slaveholders, and the leaders among us, although publicly committed against ”_slavery in the abstract_,” were endeavoring to soften the hard features of slavery in the Southern States by arguing that the relation of master and slave was not sinful _per se_, as it was recognized and regulated both in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
Bro. Butler was ordained as a minister of the gospel of Christ, among the. Disciples, at Sullivan, Ohio, some time in the year 1844, by A.
B. Green and J. H. Jones, at that time two of the most efficient evangelists in Northern Ohio He had a good conscience, which pa.s.sed judgment upon his actions in accordance with the great law of love inculcated by the Lord himself and his apostles, and he did not allow the application of any ”hot iron” so as to sear it. Although he did not come in direct antagonism with the pro-slavery power while he labored in the gospel ministry east of the Missouri River, yet it is evident that the slavery question was a most important factor in making up his decision to leave his field of labor in the Military Tract in Illinois, where he gave up present usefulness and ministerial blessedness for a prospective missionary field and a humble home for his family. He had spent four years there in active ministerial labor; and in the second number of his ”Personal Recollections” he calls them ”the golden days of my life!”
That the hand of G.o.d directed the footsteps of Pardee Butler to Kansas just at the time he went there, and to the place where he took a homestead and improved it, and lived on it with his family for a third of a century, no one who believes in an overruling providence can for a moment doubt. At the risk of his life, and at the cost of great privation in his own person, and that of his wife and children, he unfurled the blood-stained banner of the cross, and never allowed it to trail beneath his feet through the long years of ”border ruffianism,” and the dark days of detraction and misrepresentation. He was the man for the hour; while on the one hand he was not forgetful of the obligations resting upon him to his family--he laid the foundation for a happy home--on the other hand, he was always ready, both in season and out of season, at home and abroad, to preach the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ to a lost and dying world. To him more than to any other human instrumentality is the brotherhood of Christ's disciples indebted for the early introduction of Christianity in the now grand State of Kansas; and his name will be honorably and lovingly remembered by all the good and the true, who shall learn of his unselfish life and his untiring devotion to the cause of the Master.
In the summer of 1858, after he had been in the new Territory over three years, Bro. Butler, in the _Luminary_, writes as follows: ”To teach, discipline, and perfect the churches we have already organized; to gather into churches the lost sheep of the house of Israel, scattered over this great wilderness of sin; to watch over those who are still purposing to tempt its dangers, and to lay broad and deep the foundations of a future operation and co-operation, that shall ultimate in spreading the gospel from pole to pole, and across the great sea to the farthest domicile of man--this is the purpose which we set before us.” This brief quotation shows the broadness and completeness of the work, as contemplated by him, and which is now going forward to its accomplishment as never before; and to his almost alone labors at first the work in Kansas can be legitimately traced.
During this year a Territorial Board was formed, and Bro. Butler was appointed as their evangelist; and a correspondence was had between him and the corresponding secretary of the General Missionary Society in reference to affording aid to the Kansas Board to help sustain him in his evangelical labors. It was conducted in the most friendly manner and in a true Christian spirit, until the slavery question came to the front and prevented the accomplishment of what was hoped for on the one hand, and contemplated on the other. The following extract from Bro. Butler's third letter will present the issue in the briefest manner possible:
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.
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 circ.u.mstances, 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 members.h.i.+p 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 inst.i.tution, 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 a.s.sumes 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.
I did not then, nor do I now, suppose that if you were employed by the A. C. M. S. to preach the gospel in Kansas, it would fall to your lot to furnish instructions to many masters and servants. If in any churches you may raise up in Kansas--evidently destined to be free--you find masters and slaves, of course it will be your duty to instruct them both ”according to the Bible.” But to furnish such instruction, and to go through Kansas lecturing on anti-slavery, or mixing up any pro-slavery or any anti-slavery theories and dogmas with the gospel, or to plant churches with the express understanding that no ”master” shall be allowed to have members.h.i.+p in it, are very different things. And I had this very matter in view when I wrote to you, for I had some-how heard that the church of which you were a member was about to take just such a stand, and I wanted to have it distinctly understood that so far as action under the direction of the A. C. M. S. was concerned, all such ultraisms must be ignored. . . . You felt anxious to have help to preach the gospel in Kansas. I felt anxious to a.s.sist you. I saw danger in the way, growing out of the fact that I represent a society whose members.h.i.+p is in the South as well as in the North, and that some factious ultraists are constantly on the watch to sow the seeds of discord. I knew the state of things in Kansas as bearing on the slavery question. I knew something, too, of your treatment there, and of your feelings. I saw that if you were employed to preach there, an effort would be made to herald it, as in Bro. Beardslee's Case, as an anti-slavery triumph. This would be unjust to us. And as the practical question of master and slave does not exist there to any extent, I spoke of ignoring the question altogether. If you still insist on the right to urge that question, and take part in the controversy raging in Kansas, _under the patronage of the A. C. M. S_., I have only to say it is outside the objects contemplated in our const.i.tution. But if you wish simply to preach the gospel and instruct converts in a knowledge of Christian duties, ”according to the Scriptures,” there was certainly no occasion for your second letter to be written.