W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

saving the heathen of your home city or town, set it down you will also prove a failure in Hong Kong. Mark it
down, “Where there is a will, there is a way.” Do not forget the old Roman motto: “Perseverantia omnia vincit.”
Perseverance conquers all things.
4. YOUNG MANHOOD
Our graduating day, June 30, 1859, was a great orationary epoch in my life. An audience of ten thousand, and
twenty young men delivering their graduating orations to the spellbound multitude, interspersed with the finest
music the country could produce; meanwhile bouquets rained from the audience at the close of the speeches,
congratulatory of the orator.
My wedlock was felicitous in the superlative degree. It has always seemed to me that God, in His mercy,
ransacked creation when He selected a helpmeet for unworthy me. When I was a youth attending school at
Perryville, a great revival swept through the Methodist Church, converting one hundred and seven souls. I was
then a preacher in my humble way; especially during my utmost to glorify God in the dispensation of the Gospel
to the toiling slaves, who were much neglected. While the house was overcrowded and the altar flooded with
weeping penitents, the leader called on me to pray. The Lord helped me, and as the converting power descended,
a rosy damsel of fifteen bright years arose near me with a radiant face and jubilant shout. I was not personally
acquainted with her, although I knew her father, who was a leading member of the church. I saw him rush in and
take this rejoicing damsel in his arms. One near me said: “One of Jim Durham's girls has got religion.” In the
providence of God, five and a-half years subsequently she became my wife. Forty-six years have rolled away. If
we both live four years more we will reach our golden wedding. But this is certainly very improbable, as we are
both quite out in the evening and she, although six and a-half years my junior, has felt the burden of the conflict
more than I, and much indicates physical disability. We have one consolation: if we do not reach our golden
wedding in the dear “Old Kentucky home,” we will have it in the New Jerusalem, where there is plenty of gold,
and the nuptial festival will never hear the final benediction.
We entered into our engagement two years before the time appointed for its verification. I still had a year in
college. Then I knew I would graduate deeply in debt, and I was not willing to get married until that was all
liquidated. Those are two memorable years in my pilgrimage. As I was studying and teaching off at a
considerable distance, I visited her but seldom during the time. I invariably found other suitors waiting on her. It
kept me in hot water. I thought she ought to dismiss them all, in view of her engagement to me, but was afraid to
suggest it, lest she might think I was too particular, and conclude to eliminate me instead of them. Therefore I
said nothing about it to her or to anybody else, but kept it before the Lord, wondering if she would finally be
true to the engagement she had made with me. Sure enough the happy day rolled around, when we met the
crowd at her father's house, with the presiding elder ready to officiate. Those beaux who had given me so much
annoyance the preceding two years were also on hand, but they looked blue as indigo and sad as if they were at
a funeral. I never saw them afterward. The solemnization of the nuptials eliminated them forever.
Here we see a beautiful lesson illustrated in the gracious economy. Until you get married to the Lord the carnal
suitors, arrayed in all the alluring phantasmagoria of the world, will wait on you, to your constant annoyance if
you are true to God, as well as your incessant peril, because in an evil hour you may succumb to their
bewitching enchantments and enter into wedlock with one of them, which will seal your doom in endless woe.
Immediately after my graduation I became president of a college, and having on hands the entire collegiate
course, classical and scientific, through which I had passed as a student of the curriculum, I enjoyed a grand
opportunity to review the books and explain them to the classes, thus even making it more profitable than the
post-graduate course, which is the frequent resort of collegiate graduates for their establishment before their
newly accumulated learning will evanesce. Our school was a booming success; meanwhile the people also
seemed delighted and much edified by my preaching.
The great Civil War broke out only one year after our marriage. A terrible battle, the most bloody and
magnitudinous in Kentucky during the entire war, was fought at Perryville, and, of course, superinduced the
utter abandonment of our college, the dispersion of all the people identified with it, and the occupancy of the
building as a Union hospital. Very soon I responded to a call at Russellville, and, whither we migrated,