W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

education, taking the entire regular classical course, finally graduating June 30, 1859, and receiving my Latin
diploma. It cost me one thousand dollars, every cent of which, in the providence of God, I made by teaching, as
my dear father and mother were not able to give me any financial help.
On our graduating day, when we twenty young men delivered our orations and received our diplomas, six of us
were preachers and, sad to say, about six drunkards, and the other eight gentlemen of correct lives. During those
six years I saw many young men go out from college, not only without salvation, but on the slippery steeps of
dissipation which precipitate their incumbents into the bottomless pit. I have been praising the Lord all my life
for a father and mother who were too poor to give me money on which to dissipate. The greatest intellectualist
in our class, a younger man than myself, has already gone to a drunkard's grave, leaving the world as he lived,
utterly regardless of God. If my parents had been rich, I, like my classmates and college chums, would have
been exposed to those awful temptations which plunged them in ruin and, as we fear, eternally. Oh, what a
mistake Christian parents make to pile up money for their children when they are so likely to use it to pay their
way to Hell! What a glory if they had only given that money to evangelize one thousand millions of poor
heathens through the ages sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death.
I do believe that I will praise God forever in Heaven for giving me parents who never had one dollar to give me
to defray my expenses to Hell. But they did give me a patrimony which outshines all the gold that ever glittered,
and all the diamonds that ever sparkled, and all the rubies that ever radiated.
That inheritance is God's precious Word and the testimony of His glorious redeeming grace in their own hearts;
and an humble Christian home, where God was feared, loved, and obeyed. Well does Solomon say, “Wisdom is
better than riches.”
I much regret the deprivation of a classical education which has supervened in the last forty years.
The proportion of students in colleges now prosecuting the regular classical course is much smaller than it was
during the years of my college life. This is in harmony with the general trend of the age to superficialism, which
is manifest in every department of practical life at the present day; e. g., in architectural, for while the buildings
of all sorts are vastly more fastidious, showy, and ornamental, they are lamentably deficient in solidity,
substantiality, and durability. This you will observe in every ramification of the arch. We are constantly
constrained to deplore this tendency in the spiritual realm, where we observe it most obvious and significant
throughout, I. e., superficial conviction, insubstantial conversions and unsatisfactory sanctifications; superficial
professions all along the line of evangelistic work.
Especially do we observe this superficialism in the educational realm. Learning in all departments has caught
the impatient fugitive spirit of the age, dashing through with all possible expedition, rushing to a superficial
graduation, reaching the end prematurely and going out into the world professionally ready for business, when
the diploma is but a farce and a burlesque. The old style four years' course, Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and
Senior classes, which had long prevailed in all the regular colleges, is about given up and superseded by
irregular classification, in view of expediting the graduation. It is high time for us to halt and heed the apostle
James, “Let patience have her perfect work.” We hear them say, “I must finish my education, get out preaching,
or off into my missionary field.” There is always a wide open door for all to preach who will while they are
prosecuting their education. Here we have great Cincinnati, with her suburban cities, comprising half a million
people, open wide for evangelistic work, and you find it so everywhere; therefore there is no apology for losing
time in response to your call to preach. If you ever succeed in this life, you must learn the great problem of
harmonizing perpetual study with incessant labor, in the field of disinterested philanthropy to which you are
called. The most blessed collegiate education you will ever receive, instead of winding up your student life only
begins it, thus qualifying you to dispense with the constant help and guidance of teachers, paddle your own
canoe across the stormy river of probationary life and secure a safe landing on the golden shore of a glorious
immortality. If you are ever a success in any department of intellectual labor, you must be a student all your life,
surviving the migratory abstractions of transitory allurements and reaching that concentration of mentality
which will make you an incessant student.
(1) You need a classical education to qualify you to successfully study the blessed Bible. This is obvious
from the fact that it was never written in your vernacular nor that of any other person now loving on the earth,