Chapter 24
Section 24 of From Life to Life or How Our Preachers Die. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Claire. From Life to Life or How Our Preachers Die by William Marion Weekly. Rev. C. F. Bowers.
Rev. G. B. Perks. Bishop Jonathan Weaver. Rev. C. F. Bowers A ripe sheaf was this father for the heavenly garner. He was licensed to preach by Bishop Coons at Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania in 1844
and went to the heavenly home 63 years later at the ripe age of 86. I do not think I shall be sick or suffer or linger long, he said. I have asked God for a speedy release without pain, and I believe he will grant it. God, our Heavenly Father, bless you all. Meet me in heaven. The parting sigh their fetters breaks. We scarce can say they're gone, before the willing spirit
takes its station near the throne. Rev. G. B. Perks, be ye also ready. So Jesus commands, and blessed are those servants whom the Lord, when he cometh, shall find watching. At the age of seventy, having been a minister fifty-five years, Mr. Perks said in his last moments. I am not packing up, but I am ready to go. I am ready to be packed. When asked by his son if the grace of God still sustained him, he answered, It does, my lad, it does. He was
translated from Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Bishop Jonathan Weaver. To the believer, death is a veritable exodus, not an arrest but a rescue, not an imprisonment but an enfranchisement. It comes not to increase his troubles but to end them, not to impair his joys but to complete them. Jonathan Weaver believed all this and richly experienced its truth. His last message to the Church was,
I have no doubt as to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I believed what I preached and preached what I believed. I die in the faith of the gospel I preached to others. Jesus Christ is all and in all. Tell the brethren never to depart from the doctrines held by the fathers
that a vital union with Christ is essential to the Christian life. His last utterances were, I shall see the King in his beauty. I feel perfectly safe. He was born February 23, 1824, converted and joined the United Brethren Church when 17, licensed to preach by the Muskingum, now East Ohio, Conference in 1847, elected bishop in 1865, and left earth for glory February 6,
1901. Quote, When the darkness melts away at the breaking of the day, bids us hail the cheering ray light forevermore." End of section 24
