Like William Seymour I....
1. Begun Baptist
2. Continued Pentecostal
3. Will more than likely finish Holiness
The problem is an age old one... Going out of the Spirit into the flesh. Not everyone Pentecostal speaks in tongues as the Holy Spirit gives utterance. I would attend mountain Pentecostal revivals in the long ago in which one pastors wife would scream when the spirit would come upon here. I have often wondered where that screaming originated... The Spirit? The flesh? Or the Devil? When I give my testimony on how the Pentecostal revival blessed me I must go back decades in the past. For I do not sense the same Spirit as I experienced decades ago....
George Clark Rankin - Rockytopva Testimony
Innocence from evil.... George Clark Rankin would enjoy quality revival in his teenage years. When he begun the university he would run into characters who would destroy his innocence and I could not find happy countenance on the man from there on. He goes on to say....
Up to this time, as I have already indicated, my faith was simple, confiding and unquestioning. It was the faith of my childhood.Then it was that Colonel Burkett assumed to speak. He was a man of strong intellect, well trained and widely read. He was not a religious man. The following is the substance of his deliverance:
"Wallace has not only made a mistake, but he has acted against common sense and reason. There is nothing in religion except tradition on the outside and emotion on the inside. The Bible is not a book to be believed. It is full of discrepancies and contradictions. The Old Testament is horrible. There are things in it that shock decency, to say nothing of a man's sense. The New Testament comes to us by a sort of accident. When King James appointed his commission to collate the manuscripts they threw out some of them and one or two of the present gospels came very nearly being discarded. They were retained by a very narrow majority. A number of the epistles, ascribed to Paul's authorship, were never written by him and they are not entitled to belief. They are a jumble of incongruous writings brought down from an ignorant age, and they are not in keeping with the intelligence of the race. The age has outlived them; they belong to a period filled with ignorance and superstition. Christ, if he ever lived, was a good man, but misguided and died as the result of his fanaticism. Wallace has only written himself down a fool by giving up a good law practice to enter the ministry."
But imagine the effect of all this on my innocent mind. It knocked me into smithereens. I had never dreamed of anything like that I had heard. It aroused all sorts of feelings and all sorts of questionings. It flung me headforemost out into a stormy sea without rudder or compass. The waves grew tumultuous about me. I was almost engulfed.
I arose and went to bed, but I did not go to sleep. I tossed from side to side filled with fear and misgivings. I thought of my mother and her faith; then it occurred to me that mother was just like myself. She had never seen anything of the world, had never read many books and was not an educated woman. She, maybe, was liable to mistakes. The man whom I had heard talk was an educated man; he had informed himself in history; he had traveled; he was a much smarter man than his father, and maybe he knew things that the rest of us did not know. He saw nothing in the Bible to call forth his faith and a number of the others seemed to agree with him. He did not even accept Christ as his Savior. And yet I was starting out to prepare myself to preach this gospel and to hold up Christ to men and women. Is it possible that after all there is nothing in it? Can it be that the whole thing is a fable, as my learned friend had argued? It was one of the most miserable nights I ever spent in my life.
