A testimony should talk. Why so? Because the proof of the pudding is in the eating. A genuine Christian experience is hard to refute, in many cases, impossible. All attempts to contradict such testimonies only reveal their weakness in the presence of genuineness and truth. When stock was taken of the early Christians, it was evident that they had been with Jesus. Only He can accomplish active godliness in any soul. There is something about a born again Christian that cannot be duplicated.
In giving my testimony, I mention the above as the only explanation for the wonderful change in my life. Something completely external to myself had come into my dark soul. I later learned that this experience was to be born from above by the Holy Spirit, or to use the words of another, “Nought have I gotten, but what I received, Grace has bestowed it since I have believed. ”
I was born in London, England, in 1904 and raised on the sea coast directly south of London. Eastbourne became a great center for the wounded in World War 1. Scores of us had vivid recollections of that era. In 1920, I entered Gravesend Sea School and five months later I was sent to serve on one of Britain’s last square rigged tall ships as a dock boy.
The voyage took over a year, going to Buenos Aires and South Australia. Then there were three more years in the British Merchant Marine. After those three additional years of seafaring, I skipped ship in New York.
Not succeeding in the job market, a placard caught my eye, “Join the army for one year.”
After enlisting, I was sent to Fort Hancock, NJ. On the post was an Army YMCA to which I resorted. This “Y,” unknown to me at the time, had its expenses underwritten by the Tenafly Assembly. The place was a bristling gospel center.
The first night I visited, a service was conducted and I was possibly saved that night or shortly thereafter when substitution was explained to me. It was in May of 1924.
In the fall of 1925, I enrolled as a day boarding student at Philadelphia School of the Bible and graduated three years later. At school I had Dr. William Pettingill for two years. He was the last of the co-editors of the Scofield Bible. I still like to call myself one of Dr. Pettingill’s boys.
After graduating from Bible School in the 1928 class, I had little choice but to join the Army Transport Service. This took me to Honolulu and the Far East. The chaplain AN generally were pleased to have someone share the preaching. This lasted for two years.
After this, I happened to be available to fill a need that had arisen in a mission work in a poor section of Bristol, TN. There I served several months in a pastoral capacity. Later on I felt more comfortable joining up with assembly workers in tent work. Eventually I acquired a gospel tent of my own and made enough folding seats to accommodate 100 people, spending several years in planting work in Virginia.
Garland and I were married in 1936 and have two sons, both of whom are doctors. Our mature years have been spent in the Baltimore area. For ten years we taught varied subjects with Baltimore School of the Bible, also doing some circulating among some of the assemblies in the eastern U.S.
The past three years we have spent at the Gospel Hall Home for the Aged in Longport, NJ. Both of us have some common limitations that accompany aging. However, so far as I am able, I continue in public ministry although confined to the Home.