hey trembled for themselves and their children,
if they should not be found faithful.

If these churches are not able at the present time to exhibit a growth
adequate to their opportunities, it must be remembered, on their behalf,
that they have sent to the West an incredibly large number of disciples
to serve as the nuclei for other churches throughout that mighty empire
that within the past thirty years has grown up between the Missouri
River and the Pacific Ocean.

The days I spent in these churches are the golden days of my life. There
has been no field in which my labor as an evangelist has yielded a
richer harvest; none in which there have been bestowed on me more
flattering or more kindly attentions. It was the bright and joyous
sunshine of a spring morning, before the bursting of the storm.

Though each year increased my attachment to the people, and apparently
added their good-will to myself, there had been coming to the front a
difficulty that could not any longer be thrust aside or disregarded. I
was one hundred and fifty miles away from home, and from my wife and
children. On holding a council of war to consider our future tactics, in
which Mrs. Butler, was commander-in-chief, and myself, second in
command, she said to me, "Pardee, I am willing to go wherever you say,
only when we go there we must go to stay. We must not put our house on
wheels. We must not leave our children without settled employment,
exposed to all the hazards of a city life, or a life without a permanent
habitation."

Under such circumstances the settling on a home in reference to which it
could be said, "Here we are to stay," was not an easy matter. The
people of the Military Tract were, almost all of them, Kentuckians.
There were evidently impending storms in the political horizon. I could
not bend my sails to suit every favoring gale; and if, in the future,
there should come a time that my conscience should lie in one direction,
and my popularity and pecuniary interest in the other, I did not like to
invite such a temptation. At any rate, I did not like to place myself in
such a position that to bring down on my head popular odium would be to
invite pecuniary ruin. These counties in the Military Tract were old
settled counties, and land was high; and I was not rich. At this time
the Kansas-Nebraska bill had been adopted by Congress, and Kansas had
been opened for settlement. It was certain that Eastern Kansas, in the
matter of fer