W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

themselves of the Sabbath to do their visiting, which is all wrong, unless we want to visit the sick, the poor, or
the suffering, in the interest of their souls and bodies. When people died and they buried them about in different
places, I was always permitted to go and visit the scene. My father generally officiated in a funeral service at the
grave, the coffin's lid being always removed and the people all invited to come and look on the face of the dead
for the last time. A near neighbor of ours always made the coffins and would come to the interment, and after
people had all looked at the corpse, he would nail the coffin's lid down fast, as they had no screws for them then.
The sound of the hammer nailing up the coffin roared in my ears like thunder, and continued to haunt my
childish memory night and day. My father would give out that old song, two lines at a time,
“Hark from the tombs a doleful sound,
My ears attend the cry;
Ye living men, come view the ground,
Where you must shortly lie.
“Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your towers.
Ye tall, ye wise, ye reverent head
Must lie as low as ours.
“Great God, is this our certain doom
And are we yet secure?
Still marching downward to the tomb,
And yet prepared no more.
“Grant us the power of quickening grace,
To fit our souls to fly;
Then when we drop this dying flesh,
We'll rise above the sky.”
Funerals were generally attended by all the people in the neighborhood. They always held their service at the
grave. As my father would give out this song, and others of a similar character, two lines at a time, the whole
multitude would sing them so loudly and with such impressive solemnity as actually to remind us of the
judgment trumpet blowing. After this they would let the coffin down into the grave with ropes, whose loud
rattling and creaking conduced to the trepidation which always filled my heart on those memorable occasions.
The whole crowd remained until the grave was filled up. The falling of the clods on the coffin-lid produced an
awful and doleful roar, striking panic to our hearts and causing some to weep aloud.
My father was always sent for to visit the sick and get them ready to die. He preached much at different places
and God wonderfully used him in keeping a chronic conviction on me and a perpetual seeking of the Lord. If he
and mother had understood the privilege of children to be intelligently converted before they reach
responsibility and lose their infantile justification, and, like adult Christians, live in communion and in the
enjoyment of justifying peace and soul rest, I shall always believe that they could have kept me in the kingdom
of God, but at that time everybody thought that we had to grow up sinners before we could get converted. As
above mentioned, I am satisfied that after I learned about God and became a sincere and earnest seeker, I
actually met my Savior and enjoyed communion with Him and soul rest, but I knew not how to abide in the
kingdom.
Drifting away, I was afterwards reclaimed, perhaps several times. As I grew older, and the sphere of my
responsibility enlarged, though in my outward life rigidly keeping the moral law, my interior spirit drifted
farther and farther from God. Meanwhile I never ceased to pray, really being a chronic mourner all my life, till I
was finally and gloriously converted at the age of sixteen, after which I never again drifted out of the kingdom.
At that time there was no very decisive change externally marked in my life, as it already had been
unimpeachable, so far as the world could discriminate.
In the change of time there has been a great detraction from the efficiency of death-bed scenes and funerals in
facilitating conviction and restraint from sinful resources. They were the most potent agencies which constantly
cooperated in keeping conviction on me. As I revert to the scenes of my childhood and youth, it seems that I
would have been unable to resist the formidable combinations of temptations incident to the juveniles, had it not