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.
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