Rev. B. H. Spencer.
Neither goodness, kindness, humility nor usefulness in a minister of the gospel could disarm malice or shield the servant of God from the persecutions of wicked men. It is truly astonishing how many and how diverse the pretexts framed for the arrest, robbery, banishment, imprisonment or murder of those whose only crime was that they were ministers of the gospel in connection with the M. E. Church, South. Infidelity was never at a loss for expedients and Antichrist was never without efficient agents.
The Rev. B. H. Spencer is almost a native of Missouri, being only six months of age when his parents came to Missouri from North Carolina, and has received regular appointments from the Missouri Annual Conference, M. E. Church, South, consecutively since 1843, when he was first admitted on trial. No man has a cleaner and purer record in the Church, both in his personal and ministerial character; and few men have occupied so many places of high trust and responsibility. He is one of the old Presiding Elders, and has often been called to represent his Conference on the floor of the General Conference, and has always proved himself to be prudent in council, wise in legislation, correct in administration and eminently useful in the pulpit; distinguished, perhaps, for his scriptural, practical and forcible expositions of the distinctive doctrines and duties of Bible Christianity. He is zealous, humble, earnest, energetic and Methodistic in all his ministerial work; extensively known and highly esteemed in love for his works’ sake all over the State.
Long associated with the honored names that will live in the annals of Missouri Methodism, and taking a high rank with them, the sentiments that introduced the Rev. W. M. Rush to these pages, and the reader, may, with but little alteration, introduce Mr. Spencer.
Mr. Spencer is a representative man in his character and position in Missouri, and while his persecutions were severe and protracted, his was not an isolated case. He represents in his cruel and wanton exile a large class of Missourians, and especially of Missouri ministers, some of whom will, perhaps, never return to this State. B. T. Kavanaugh, L. M. Lewis, E. K. Miller, B. R. Baxter and many others are possibly lost to the State forever. They may have gone out for different causes, but the peculiar proscription and persecutions to which ministers in Missouri have been subjected kept them out.
Few if any cases of persecution in Missouri present more deliberate meditation, cooler cruelty and more heartless inhumanity than the one disclosed in the following narrative, made in Mr. Spencer’s own quiet, clear and forcible style. His letters to the various military officials, written in exile, and while all the finer sentiments and feelings of his manly, Christian heart were writhing under the cruel injustice he had to bear without the means of vindication or the hope of redress, are worthy the pen of Cranmer, and would have given a higher tone and temper to the moral courage of Latimore.
The reader must, however, measure the man and his persecutors by the following paper: