W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

This is a dangerous attitude. The Dead Sea takes in the River Jordan and other waters, but gives out not a drop.
If you would not become a Dead Sea, you had better be a faithful dispenser of physical benefaction, intellectual
erudition and spiritual pabulum, to all you meet in this probationary pilgrimage. This is my forty-eighth book.
These books have gone out to the number of two hundred thousand copies and millions are feeding on them. If
my eyes had enabled me to read other people's book ad libitum, I do not believe I ever would have been a book
writer. The truth of the matter is, I do not write the books of my authorship, could not for the want of eye power
I dictate them all to amanuenses. I have no doubt but that I have actually done vastly more good in the world
with these enfeebled eyes than in case they had remained strong and penetrating, like those of the eagle centered
upon the noonday sun, whither he wings his upward flight.
Let me exhort you to sink so profoundly into the sweet will of God that you will hail all of His permissive
providences as blessings, even though they may be so disguised that uncircumcised eyes will mistake them for
curses. I hope your faith is so athletic and doubtless that you actually see God in everything. Rest assured, if you
are really lost in His will He will make your darkest adversities your brightest sunbursts. The axiom of Jesus
during His ministry was, “Be it unto you according to your faith”, therefore when the darkest clouds envelop
your sky, remember their upper side in which the sun is shining is white as snow. The truth of the matter is that
neither men nor devils can do anything to God's people without permission, and that permission transforms the
most terrible calamities into blessings. My life work is in the use of the eye; my greatest physical ailment in my
whole life has been this ocular feebleness and failure. Yet when I see how God took me from wearing out my
brain reading other people's books to the glorious privilege of dictating all of these books for others to read – an
honor and benediction of which I never dreamed – oh, what unspeakable goodness and mercy were thus
bestowed on unworthy me!
3. YOUTH
In the preceding chapter you see how God, through my indefatigable perseverance, gave me my first school to
teach at the age of twenty, when I only weighed ninety-three pounds and looked like a little boy, so very
juvenile, and beardless as a lassie. After the first school, I never had any trouble to get employment whenever I
wanted it, and commanded splendid wages. Having taught my first school at the age of twenty, then I wanted to
go away to a grammar school and learn English grammar, of which I was utterly ignorant. But as it was
universally customary in that country for the boys to work for their parents till they were twenty-one, when they
reached majority and received their freedom, I was actually too conscientious to cheat my parents. I was not
twenty-one till the third day of the following June, therefore I sold my horse which I had raised on the farm, or
rather which my father had given me, for ninety dollars, and hired a stout young man to take my place on my
father's farm till the day of my majority. This gave me four months to attend the grammar school, where I made
grammar my specialty, devoting all of my time to the study of it, and actually mastered it, so that I could teach it
and never did recite it any more. Having reached majority and become my own man, according to the civil law, I
never again returned to labor on my father's farm, but devoted all of my time to teaching and attending college.
God gave me wonderful physical hardihood, and I was an untiring, assiduous student, the teachers in every
school certifying that I accomplished more in the time than any other young man they ever knew. At the age of
twenty-one I entered upon the study of Latin and Greek. I carried my books with me everywhere I went and
committed them to memory so I could recite them from beginning to end. Though I was then a preacher, I was
not sanctified, and had a Napoleonic ambition. One day when we recited our Latin, the teacher assigned us onehalf
of the conjugation of the active verb “amo” for a lesson, at the same time observing that when he was a
student he took a whole verb for a lesson. I spoke out, “I can learn as big a lesson as you or any other man.”
Then he assigned us the whole conjugation to commit to memory. When the recitation rolled round the next day,
I knew every word of it, while all the balance of the class so failed that he reassigned it to them for the next day.
We had been studying for about four or five months, when he took me out of the class of beginners and put me
in the next highest class, which had studied it one year before I got there. It was not long before I stood at the
head of that class. I did not progress so rapidly in Greek, owing to the fact that the teacher, while quite proficient
in Latin, was not so thorough in Greek. It was not long until I left that college and went to another, at
Georgetown, Ky., which was old and very thorough. I spent six years in the prosecution of my collegiate