Personal Recollections of Pardee ButlerButler, Pardee
Religion
Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler
Butler, Pardee
Kansas -- History -- 1854-1861
Having glanced at some of the evils attendant on Western
life, I must hasten to indicate what class of men should
come to the West. The poor of our cities, whose poverty
becomes the more haggard by being placed in immediate
proximity to measureless profusion, luxury and
extravagance--respectable people, whose whole life is a
lifelong struggle to keep up appearances, and in whom the
securing of affluence is like putting on a corpse the
frippery and finery of the ball-room; young men with brave
hearts and willing hands--these are the classes that may
come, and should come, to the West. And if Adam, realizing
that the world is all before him, where to choose, looks
to the West to find his Eden, I would respectfully suggest
that he has an infirmity in his left side, and that his
best security against the perils of a pioneer life is to
take to himself the rib that is wanting.
The tenant, living on the farm of another man, should come
to the West. He can not plant a tree and call it his own.
God gave the whole world to Adam and his sons, and the
true dignity of every son of Adam requires that he should
be able to stand in the midst of his own Eden and say:
"This, under God, is mine."
There is yet another class of men that may always go to
the West, or to any other place. Whether young, or old, or
middle-aged--whether rich or poor--they may go, and the
blessings of God go with them. These are the men whose
hearts are full of faith, and hope, and love--who
sympathize with all, and who, consequently, will find
friends among all--who are willing to be missionaries of
the cross, and to be pillars in the churches they have
helped to nurture into life.
Kansas is full of men who were once members of our
churches, but who are stranded on the rocks of apostasy,
on whom the storms of life will beat yet a little while,
and then they will sink down into ever-lasting ruin.
Strong drink, the love of money, or, perhaps, the
inadequacy of their former teaching, is the occasion of
their fall. Others, scattered over this great wilderness
of sin, remain faithful amidst abounding wickedness, and
stretch out their hands and utter the Macedonian cry,
"Come over and help us."
The apostolic age was pre-eminently an age of missionary
effort. What will the world say of us, and of our
confident, and, as some would say, arrogant, pretense to
have restored primitive and apostolic Christianity, when
our Israel in so large a part of the great West is such a
moral wreck--such a spectacle of scattered, abandoned,
and, too often, ruined church members, unknown, untaught
and uncared for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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