Personal Recollections of Pardee ButlerButler, Pardee
Religion
Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler
Butler, Pardee
Kansas -- History -- 1854-1861
Bro. Humber, as president of the Board, did not call it
together to complete the arrangement contemplated. On my
own part, I felt unwilling to importune him. I went on my
tour, therefore, simply under the indorsement and approval
of my own congregation. I left home December 16, 1858, and
returned May 12, 1859. I visited the Military Tract of
Illinois, Northeast Iowa, Southwest Michigan, Central and
Eastern Indiana, and Northern Ohio. The amount of money
realized was $365; expenses, $110, leaving a balance on
hand of $255, as the first installment of the fund of our
begun mission.
Of all the churches in which I sought a hearing only one,
the church at Bedford, Ohio, gave me the cold shoulder. In
response to my request for the privilege of delivering a
lecture before them, in development of our wants and
condition in Kansas, they responded that they considered
it "political," and they had resolved that their house
should not be used for political lectures!.... In all the
localities visited by me, I found the masses of the people
with such convictions as will constrain them to treat
slavery in the United States as a moral evil, and to
patronize only such societies as assume toward it a
similar position. It is asked: What have we to do with
slavery? I reply: We, as Christians, should have nothing
to do with it. But we in Kansas are placed under
compulsion to have something to do with it. We have
slaveholders in our churches; and if the time should come
when there will be no slaves in Kansas, still we have
something to do with it, for within one day's ride of us
in Platte county, Mo., is the largest body of slaveholders
in that State. Discipline is special to each congregation,
but that sense of justice which always stands as the basis
of discipline, is common to all the churches of one
communion. This public opinion is created by a mutual
interchange of sentiment--the books we read and the
preachers we hear. For years past slaveholders have ceased
to hear those suspected of abolitionism or to read their
writings. I will bear very long with error where mutual
discussion and free interchange of sentiment promise
ultimately to bring all to be of the same mind. Am I told
that the safety of slave property requires that
Abolitionists should not be heard in the slave States? I
reply: The more shame to those who perpetuate an
institution that demands for its security the tyranny of
such proscription; and that the human soul of the black
man should be so cruelly dwarfed and robbed of his
manhood. . . . Such are the not very flattering
impressions made on my mind during a five months' tour in
Northern Ohio, after an absence of nine years. There must
and will be a reform; it has become a public necessity.
Temporizers are proverbially short-sighted. God gives only
to the pure-hearted the divine privilege of foreseeing the
coming of those beneficent revolutions, which exalt and
dignify humanity. Ambitious and selfish men are left to go
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