His funeral took place the following day in the church at Pardee. The services were conducted by Elders John Boggs, of Clyde, and J. B. McCleery, of Fort Leavenworth. The house was full, notwithstanding it was a stormy day, raining continuously from morning until night. Word had been sent to all the churches in this and adjacent counties, and hundreds who were preparing to attend the funeral were disappointed by the inclement weather.
CHAPTER XL.
PRO-SLAVERY HINDRANCES.
BY ELDER JOHN BOGGS.
Although our dear departed brother, Elder Pardee Butler, was never classed with the Garrisonian Abolitionists, he began his ministerial life when the demands of the South were being felt in all the North, both in church and State. If slavery could not be advocated by the Northern conscience it must at least be ignored by all candidates for popular favor. It had divided some of the most popular religious denominations; and was the most exciting subject of discussion known to the religious world at the middle of the present century. Among the Disciples of Christ the slavery question was peculiarly perplexing, as there was a large per cent, of the membership who were actual slaveholders, and the leaders among us, although publicly committed against "slavery in the abstract," were endeavoring to soften the hard features of slavery in the Southern States by arguing that the relation of master and slave was not sinful per se, as it was recognized and regulated both in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
Bro. Butler was ordained as a minister of the gospel of Christ, among the. Disciples, at Sullivan, Ohio, some time in the year 1844, by A. B. Green and J. H. Jones, at that time two of the most efficient evangelists in Northern Ohio He had a good conscience, which passed judgment upon his actions in accordance with the great law of love inculcated by the Lord himself and his apostles, and he did not allow the application of any "hot iron" so as to sear it. Although he did not come in direct antagonism with the pro-slavery power while he labored in the gospel ministry east of the Missouri River, yet it is evident that the slavery question was a most important factor in making up his decision to leave his field of labor in the Military Tract in Illinois, where he gave up present usefulness and ministerial blessedness for a prospective missionary field and a humble home for his family. He had spent four years there in active ministerial labor; and in the second number of his "Personal Recollections" he calls them "the golden days of my life!"
That the hand of God directed the footsteps of Pardee Butler to Kansas just at the time he went there, and to the place where he took a homestead and improved it, and lived on it with his family for a third of a century, no one who believes in an overruling providence can for a moment doubt. At the risk of his life, and at the cost of great privation in his own person, and that of his wife and children, he unfurled the blood-stained banner of the cross, and never allowed it to trail beneath his feet through the long years of "border ruffianism," and the dark days of detraction and misrepresentation. He was the man for the hour; while on the one hand he was not forgetful of the obligations resting upon him to his family—he laid the foundation for a happy home—on the other hand, he was always ready, both in season and out of season, at home and abroad, to preach the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ to a lost and dying world. To him more than to any other human instrumentality is the brotherhood of Christ's disciples indebted for the early introduction of Christianity in the now grand State of Kansas; and his name will be honorably and lovingly remembered by all the good and the true, who shall learn of his unselfish life and his untiring devotion to the cause of the Master.
In the summer of 1858, after he had been in the new Territory over three years, Bro. Butler, in the Luminary, writes as follows: "To teach, discipline, and perfect the churches we have already organized; to gather into churches the lost sheep of the house of Israel, scattered over this great wilderness of sin; to watch over those who are still purposing to tempt its dangers, and to lay broad and deep the foundations of a future operation and co-operation, that shall ultimate in spreading the gospel from pole to pole, and across the great sea to the farthest domicile of man—this is the purpose which we set before us." This brief quotation shows the broadness and completeness of the work, as contemplated by him, and which is now going forward to its accomplishment as never before; and to his almost alone labors at first the work in Kansas can be legitimately traced.
During this year a Territorial Board was formed, and Bro. Butler was appointed as their evangelist; and a correspondence was had between him and the corresponding secretary of the General Missionary Society in reference to affording aid to the Kansas Board to help sustain him in his evangelical labors. It was conducted in the most friendly manner and in a true Christian spirit, until the slavery question came to the front and prevented the accomplishment of what was hoped for on the one hand, and contemplated on the other. The following extract from Bro. Butler's third letter will present the issue in the briefest manner possible: