W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

Of my Savior possessed, I was perfectly blessed,
As if filled with the fullness of God.
“My soul mounted higher, in a chariot of fire,
Nor did envy Elijah his seat;
I rode on the sky, freely justified I,
And the moon it was under my feet.
“Jesus all the day long, was my joy and my song;
Oh, that all His salvation might see!
He has saved me, I cried, He has suffered and died,
To redeem a poor sinner like me.”
Interview God's faithful pilgrims in every land and clime, and they have one and the same testimony, and tell
you with exceptional unanimity, that they never did find the Lord till they had given up all human resources.
Our work in leading souls to the Savior does not consist in gathering around them transitory consolations,
personal, legalistic, or ritualistic, but in knocking them all away, so as to leave the seeker alone with God.
Spiritual people are infinitely valuable in the way of instruction and prayer, but when we have done all in our
power, we must leave the soul alone to go to God and settle the matter for eternity. The dogma of baptismal
regeneration actually substitutes the preachers and the ordinances for the Savior, which simply means wholesale
damnation.
In my deliverances hitherto on the design of baptism and the work of the Holy Spirit and prayer, I have dealt
candidly with souls; shown neither distinction nor mercy to the people who incur the awful responsibility in
standing between the living and the dead. To extend clerical and ecclesiastical courtesy in a crisis of this kind
would simply be not merely homicide, but murder in the first degree.
I am glad God gave me grace to declare His whole counsel, “Cry aloud and spare not,” when I was in that
country where I was born and reared, and where my dear father before me heroically preached the truth which
will judge us all in the last day.
As a matter of fidelity and veracity in the run of my biography, I must make a little allusion to the mode of
baptism. If you can do so, steer clear of that dangerous heresy, hydrolatry, which is a form of idolatry so subtle
and capricious that, like a weasel, it will creep in on you before you are aware.
If you are actually lost in Jesus and can stay there, you need not be afraid of the water god, nor any other; but
rest assured, hydrolatry will settle on you like a nightmare and you will never know it till the paralysis has
carried you beyond recovery. I made a narrow escape from its grab at me; when I took immersion to sanctify me
and it utterly failed, I was enabled to pass the water line forever. Then I sought for nineteen years in my blind
way without a teacher, and God, in His great mercy, gave me the grand desideratum, for which my soul had so
long been sighing and crying. After I had passed the water line, I wandered over mountain and vale, through
valley and plain, everywhere crying out for holiness; desiring purity of heart more than anything else in the
universe.
Dry land Quakerism is one extreme and triune immersion the other. You are all right in either attitude, or
anywhere between, if you have an experience of New Testament salvation which means that you are radically
emptied of sin, and copiously filled with the Holy Ghost; lost in Jesus, desiring nothing but God, and daily
sinking deeper into His glorious Divinity. In that attitude the triune immersion, Doweyism, ritualistic
Quakerism, and the whole procession of intermediate saints, march up the King's highway in perfect harmony.
But the moment the water god gets in, he begins to rival Jesus, and proposes to divide the glory with Him;
which means confusion, apostasy, and damnation.
Our wonderful, omnipotent Jesus needs neither the help of the water god, the Campbellite preacher, Mormon
prophet, nor Roman Catholic priest. When Jesus reigns in your heart and life without a rival, you have the
everlasting victory over popery, prelacy, priestcraft, doubt, and the devil. While I have no interest whatever in
the mode of baptism, I do have the greatest interest in your soul and must warn you against the slightest