Personal Recollections of Pardee ButlerButler, Pardee
Religion
Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler
Butler, Pardee
Kansas -- History -- 1854-1861
The peerless glory of our Lord Jesus Christ--his
measureless, boundless and quenchless love--this is the
great center of attraction around which the affections of
the Christian do continually gather. The Lord is the
center of the moral universe, and all its light is but the
emanation of his glory. He dwells in the human heart, and
fills it with his love; he dwells in the family, and
becomes its ornament as when he dwelt in the house of
Lazarus; he dwells in the church, and makes it a fold in
which he nurtures his lambs.
Christians wandering over the earth like sheep having no
shepherd, isolated from their brethren, dwelling
alone--however frequent this spectacle now--is not often
witnessed in the New Testament. There they congregated in
churches. But this experiment of isolation is most
perilous to the individual, and a prodigal expenditure of
the wealth of the church, which has souls for her hire. It
is true that a few persons become centers of attraction to
new churches that grow up around them; but very many are
lost in the great whirlpool of this world's strife.
What, then, is the remedy? Evidently this: Jesus accepts
no divided empire in the human heart. He will have all or
nothing. The Church of Christ, the cause of Christ, the
people of Christ--these must be the centers of attraction
to which the heart of the Christian turns with all the
enthusiasm with which an Eastern idolater bows before the
shrine of his idol. In return for such devotion Jesus
gives to his people every imaginable blessing. Wealth,
power, dominion, science, civilization, genius, learning,
power over the elements of nature, and insight into its
magnitude, do now belong to the Lord's people in Europe
and America as they never belonged to any people before.
Yet all these must be laid at Jesus' feet before he will
make the returning prodigal the recipient of his love.
Everything must be subordinated to our religion.
Since the almighty dollar has become the touch-stone by
which everything is to be decided, I assert that this is a
good speculation: secure a neighborhood homogeneous and
not heterogeneous. Let its tendencies be favorable to
temperance, education and religion, and in doing so a man
will have added fifty per cent, to the selling value of
his property. The present thrift, wealth, genius,
enterprise and intelligence of the people of the New
England States is the legitimate outworking of the
training bestowed on their sons by the stern, old Puritans
that first peopled these inhospitable shores.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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