Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler

three preceding years; but my residence was in Cedar County, Iowa, one hundred and fifty miles from my field of labor, and twen

in the Cooperation, determined to sustain a settled pastor, and this left the churc

hes in that region. Those who have watched the progress of the temperance reform in Iowa have noticed that, while the prohibitory law is enforced almost throughout the State, there are yet exceptions in the cities of Davenport and Muscatine and the adjacent

labor in Southeastern Iowa, I was recommended to the churches in t

good exhorter, and had an unfaltering faith that the Lord was immediately to appear. But his wife was the smartest one in the family. She was fluent and voluble. She had an unabashed forehead and a bitter and defiant tongue. It was her hobby to declaim against the popular idea of the existence of the human spirit apart from the body. With her this was equivalent to a witch riding on a broomstick or going to heaven on a moonbeam. Spirit is breath-so she dogmatically affirmed-and when a man breathes out his last breath his spirit leaves his body. But it was her especial delight to declaim against the Pagan notion of the immortality of the soul, and to affirm that the Bible says nothing of the immortality of the soul. A Bro. Mc

ons. I took dinner with Bro. Brown, and in the afternoon we rode toward Ripley. On crossing the ferry at Crooked Creek, "Old Rob Burto

es

thar's a woman thar th

now. We shall se

was present, ready for a fight. But, alas! My sermon was a bucket of cold water poured on the heads of my brethren. At any other time it would have been accepted as a good and edifying exhortation; but now, how untimely! The meeting was dismissed and the buzzing was as if a hive of b

ng that night; but the n

were disappointed w

, was it not

s not what the

ninvited, to pitch into a quarrel wit

wait a little and you s

posed to speak in all the evenings of the coming week. The first commanded universal attention: "Does the spirit die when the body dies?" They had never thought of that. They had been thunderstruck when th

ul is that animal life we have in common with all living and material things. Thus Jesus is said to have poured out his soul unto death. But what of the spirit? God is spirit, and God can not die. The angels are spirits, and the angels can not die; Jesus says so. Man has a spirit, and can man's spirit die? But spirit sometimes

fable; there is no such thing as a spirit'? Did he not rather say to them,-'It is I; be not afraid.' So, also, when he appeared to them in a room, the doors being shut, and they cried out, 'It is a spirit,' he said to them, 'Handle me and

gs concerning human spirits; and in my turn ridiculed the persons that had

ed one sermon; the other party has preached twenty. So far we will count ourselves even, and it only remains that I should quote my Scripture, and let the other party quote the one Scripture on the opposite side, and then we will be dismissed." I gave the views of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees as detailed by Josephus, and t

s were turned on her, and there was a death-like stillness in the house. Then she rose up, and in a moment was out of the house. She left the town the next morni

e afterwards built a house that, in the number of rooms it contained, was wholly beyond his necessities. But he thought that when the Lord