Pending the sale of the plunder and final settlement for it, Brown remained an unwelcome prowler, in the neighborhood of Moneka, amid a storm of indignation against him that was as general as it was severe. Even his "staunch friend Wattles" severely censured him "for going into Missouri, contrary to our agreement, and getting these slaves." On January 2d, Brown wrote a formal letter to Montgomery "asking him to hold himself in readiness to call out reënforcements at a moment's notice, to prevent a possible invasion because of a raid into Missouri." But Montgomery was not holding himself in readiness to defend Brown, or to repel the retaliatory invasion he had invited; but "was eagerly at work for peace;" seeking to prevent a retaliatory blow from falling upon the Free-State settlement. What Montgomery wrote to Brown in reply to this letter, if he answered it at all, has never been published. He denied having any complicity with Brown, and joined in the general denunciation of him, and in the condemnation of his action. It was this denunciation of him by Montgomery and the Free-State men generally that called forth Brown's personal defense of his conduct, in what he called his "Parallels"; a paper conspicuous in Brown literature. The Lawrence _Herald of Freedom_ on January 8, 1859, published a letter from a clergyman at Moneka, from which the following paragraphs are extracts:[338] I have watched the progress of these troubles here until I am sick-heart-sick with humanity. Here are men claiming to be Christians, and even ministers of the Gospel, who profess to be guided in their actions by the teachings of the Prince of Peace, who have organized a body of murderers, robbers, gamblers and horse-thieves, and subsisting by plunder. They are riding over the country and committing the basest of crimes. If this is Christianity anything would be preferable to it. The strangest of all is to see peace men, those in the States who were members of peace societies, and who were sending delegates to peace congresses, laboring to inaugurate civil war, with the expressed object of working a revolution throughout the nation, ultimating in a dissolution of the Union; and all to procure the emancipation of the slave. Simple men! They should learn that revolutions involving such grave consequences are not usually set on foot by murderers and thieves. Though Brutus triumphed over the dead corpse of Cæsar, yet it is not believed that in this age of enlightment a few ignoramuses and desperadoes of the character of those in this country can succeed in crushing out slavery and with it American freedom.