W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

Church would simply have aroused his carnality in its defense. A similar mistake is made in fighting lodgery.
The thing for us to do is to preach Jesus and tell people how to get saved. You have nothing to do but get them
saved to the uttermost, I. e., sanctified wholly, and lodgery, along with sectarianism, dies a natural death. If you
want to kill, always shoot at the heart. Otherwise you may inflict flesh wounds and make a great show with
flowing blood, and yet your enemy convalesce and soon meet you again in battle array.
11. MATURITY
In the Mosaic dispensation thirty was the majority and fifty maturity. In writing up my biography I have dated
my young manhood from my sanctification in 1868, as it took that experience to bring into availability the gifts
which God had conferred in creation but which still remained latent in my constitution, myself ignorant of their
existence. Man is a trinity consisting of body, soul and spirit.
In this probationary existence the physical first predominates. It was so in my life as well as yours.
It took the new birth to supersede the body in the pre-eminence of the soul. While, in the good providence of
God, and through the hallowed experience of a godly home, a preaching father and a Christian mother, God
fortified me against the seductive vices and bewitching follies universally incident to childhood and youth, so
that I never went into them, and by His providence and grace I retained from the cradle an unimpeachable moral
character, my principal transgressions being selfward through sheer ignorance of hygienical laws: yet during my
juvenile life, antecedently to my conversion at the age of sixteen, while the physical predominated over the
intellectual and spiritual, I delighted in and excelled all of my comrades in the innocent recreations of foot
racing, wrestling, ball playing and everything else which did not conflict with a good conscience, illuminated by
the Word and Spirit of God. My conversion forever superseded all of these physical sports, yea, they at once
went into total eclipse and I left them forever. Not that I was convicted that they were sinful, but I had received
something so much better that I no longer had any appreciation of them. Thus in my pilgrimage I traveled on
another long stadium in advance of them, leaving them utterly out of sight.
The glorious experience of regeneration thus having brought the physical into a total eclipse, at the same time it
brought the intellectual into indisputable and irreversible pre-eminence. Then I moved out with all my might
into the prosecution of my collegiate education, not only pursuing but preferring the hardest studies and actually
delighting in the most arduous intellectual labor, I. e., the Latin and Greek languages, the higher mathematics
and the natural sciences. In the providence of God, nineteen years elapsed during my regenerated experience,
and during all of that time I was a most assiduous student.
Graduating from college at the expiration of the tenth year of that period, I at once became president of a college
in which, with my assistant teacher, I taught the whole classical curriculum.
Thus I was given the most athletic intellectual gymnasium possible.
When the Lord sanctified me at the age of thirty-five, He brought the spiritual into decisive pre-eminence, thus
enthroning the spirit, dominant in my being, and throwing the intellectual as well as the physical into eclipse.
Then I became like John Wesley, homo unius libri, a man of one book, and of course that Book was the Bible.
During the preceding nineteen years I had ransacked all the world for books and gathered up a library at the cost
of a thousand dollars. After I passed this great and decisive epoch in my experience, I immediately began to give
away my library, because I no longer had time to utilize those great volumes which I had hitherto so highly
esteemed. Therefore during the last thirty-eight years my time has been occupied in the spiritual realm, sin dying
the deep things of God, profoundly realizing that I know nothing but what God has revealed to me in the realm
of His providence, Word, and Spirit. I am infinitely delighted sitting like a little child at the feet of Jesus.
Meanwhile the blessed Holy Spirit, the Author of the precious Word, is revealing to my spirit the deep things of
God and the wonderful things of His kingdom, while the constant cry of my heart goes up, “Nearer, my God, to
thee.”
“To Thee and Thee alone
The angels owe their bliss;
They circle round the blazing throne,