Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler

by Pardee Butler

Meantime, temperance men look on the whole business of liquor license as an unspeakable madness. Regarded simply as a question of dollars and cents, they look on it as a horrible nightmare—a hallucination fallen on men nearly allied to that form of mental abberration which carries men to mad-houses and insane asylums, a strange and mysterious perversion of the human faculties. Regarded in its economical aspects, they hold that it would be just as good economy and as much the dictate of common sense, to obtain a revenue by licensing murder, theft, burglary, robbery, and harlotry, as it is to license the sale of intoxicating drinks as a beverage.

It will be seen, then, that prohibition incorporated into the constitution of Kansas, does not, by any means, give us the victory; it only places us in a position to fight a fair and equal battle hereafter. We are, like Israel, shouting triumphantly, "I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he drowned in the Red Sea."

But beyond us are parched and desert sands, poisonous serpents, savage wild beasts and mortal enemies. All these must be conquered before we finally rest in the happy Canaan.

It is now conceded by the best informed actors in this great drama or tragedy, that Pardee Butler, as much or more than any one man, made the prohibition movement in Kansas the marvelous success it is. The generation is yet to come that will rise up to do him rightful honor.

From '54 to '60 Pardee Butler was the Moses to the church in this wilderness, and for years following he was in some sense like Paul, "having the care of all the churches." But from the beginning he was the foremost man by virtue of natural and acquired ability, although a reluctant following was often given because of former habitudes and shibboleths, socially. There were other men in different localities who battled grandly for the truth and sowed the seed of the kingdom with firm and loyal hand: Brethren Yohe and Jackson, of Leavenworth, followed by the Bausermans, Joseph and Henry, Gans of Olathe, Brown of Emporia, White of Manhattan, and others equally worthy,—all pioneers in every good sense, and now all gone to their reward, with the exceptions of Brethren Yohe and the Bausermans. Without being formally chosen Pardee Butler was the recognized leader of these sanctified few, and no home where they entered was too humble, or field where they toiled too barren, for the light of his countenance to cheer, or the strength of his arm to be felt. In the polity and development of the church, as in other fields of moral and social struggle, he was far in advance of the time; and up to the day of his death, this was one of the great burdens that rested upon his heart.

The membership coming to the Territory, and which, of course, formed the nuclei of churches, was a heterogenous compound. In many respects there was no possible assimilation; but so far as the simple tenets of the primitive faith were concerned, there was little or no difference. But as to plurality of bishops in the congregation, their tenure and jurisdiction of office, the relations of comity between sister churches, the duties and powers of an evangelist, the laying on of hands in induction into authority, instrumental music in the congregation, the Sunday-school and its organization, the order of social worship, the mid-week meeting for prayer, and numerous other matters of scriptural life, there were as many shades of opinion as there were of dialects; and the tenacity with which they were maintained, those not familiar with the time and its environments can hardly hope to know. Yet upon all these and kindred questions, Bro. Butler had singularly clear-cut and advanced opinions. He has often said to me, "How very obtuse the churches seem to be on the plain teaching of Scripture. And the preachers are equally ignorant, or else they are willing to go limping and halting, when they could as well and better be easily marching and leading their sanctified hosts to marvelous victory."

He did not feel, or even make manifest, that he recognized his greatness in these directions only as he labored to bring the congregations and their officers up to his ideals.

In the first struggles to bring the scattered congregations into co-operative unity, he was the head and heart of the movement; and through all the varied successes and failures of those non-cohesive times and men, he never lost courage or intimated aught else than the success which now crowns the work.

I regarded him as the finest ecclesiastical historian among us, and because of his knowledge here, coupled with the philosophy that grew out of it, linked to the genius of Christianity itself, he was, by educational intuition, a missionary zealot.

Carey and the Judsons, and Barclay and Livingstone, with all others of like character, were what he termed "ripe fruit" from the Good Tree. He was to the churches in Kansas what these men and women were to the people among whom they labored. Visiting every outpost, gathering the straggling sheep into folds and striving to secure shepherds for them, stripping the fleecy garments from the wolves, uncovering the sophistries of the various polytheisms, immersing the converts and exhorting the saints, the thirty-five years he spent in Kansas were years of severest mental, moral and physical labor; and from which he asked no respite until God called him.