Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler

by Pardee Butler

The tenant, living on the farm of another man, should come to the West. He can not plant a tree and call it his own. God gave the whole world to Adam and his sons, and the true dignity of every son of Adam requires that he should be able to stand in the midst of his own Eden and say: "This, under God, is mine."

There is yet another class of men that may always go to the West, or to any other place. Whether young, or old, or middle-aged—whether rich or poor—they may go, and the blessings of God go with them. These are the men whose hearts are full of faith, and hope, and love—who sympathize with all, and who, consequently, will find friends among all—who are willing to be missionaries of the cross, and to be pillars in the churches they have helped to nurture into life.

Kansas is full of men who were once members of our churches, but who are stranded on the rocks of apostasy, on whom the storms of life will beat yet a little while, and then they will sink down into ever-lasting ruin. Strong drink, the love of money, or, perhaps, the inadequacy of their former teaching, is the occasion of their fall. Others, scattered over this great wilderness of sin, remain faithful amidst abounding wickedness, and stretch out their hands and utter the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us."

The apostolic age was pre-eminently an age of missionary effort. What will the world say of us, and of our confident, and, as some would say, arrogant, pretense to have restored primitive and apostolic Christianity, when our Israel in so large a part of the great West is such a moral wreck—such a spectacle of scattered, abandoned, and, too often, ruined church members, unknown, untaught and uncared for.

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.

But all temporal and earthly considerations disappear, as fade the stars at the approach of day, when we consider that measureless ruin, that gulf of everlasting despair, that voiceless woe, into which the emigrant may sink himself and family by locating in a profligate, dissipated or irreligious neighborhood, or in a community wholly swallowed up in the love of money, or absorbed in the questions, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed? What home on the beautiful prairies, what treasures of fine water and good timber, what corner lots, what property in town or country, can equal in value the guardianship of our Lord, the indwelling of God's good Spirit, the approval of a good conscience, the smiles of angels and the inheritance of a home in heaven? Let no man, therefore, fall into the folly—the unspeakable folly—of subordinating his spiritual and eternal interests to his temporal welfare. "Seek ye God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added."

To teach, to discipline and perfect the churches we have already organized; to gather into churches the lost sheep of the house of our Israel, scattered over this great wilderness of sin; to try and help 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, and which should be pursued with the zeal and enthusiasm displayed by the followers of the false prophet of Mecca; and with the patience of the coral workers, who build for ages and cycles of ages their marble battlements in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.