"Whatsoever you ask, believe that you have received it, and you shall have it. The belief is not the denial of a fact, but rather the assurance that the petition is in accordance with God's will, and that He is as disposed to give as we to receive; our reception of the gift depends on our holding on to His will. Now the practical question is, What is God's will? Am I conforming to it? Through lack of faith am I failing to receive and appropriate for myself and Satara what I and Satara need? Is it God's will that I should return and that there should be better paid work? More of it? More school-houses? New houses for workers?" A few days later he added to these notes the word "Yes." His faith enabled him to claim God's promise. A Christian young man in Japan was accustomed to stand at the entrance to the park in Tokyo, offering Bibles and preaching the Gospel. Years passed, and he saw no results of his work. Yet he believed in Him who had promised that His name should be exalted among the heathen. At length a Testament was bought by a young man to whom the words of John 3:16 brought life and joy. He went back to the old man from whose hand he had received the book, and told him that he had become a Christian. The man was overcome with joy. "Ten years," he said, "I have been selling New Testaments here at the park gates, and you are the first who has ever come to tell me you were helped." But throughout those ten years the faithful worker was sustained by his belief in the faithfulness of Him who had promised to bless him in his work. He knew that God would not fail him. III PRACTICAL PRECEPTS FROM PROVERBS There is nothing like the Bible to put heart into a man. This is not strange, for the Book was written for this purpose by men of God's choosing whose business it was to strengthen their fellows. One of the most vivid parts of the Bible is the book of Proverbs. "Would that our young men were saturated with its thought," Albert J. Beveridge said of it, while he was a member of the United States Senate. "It is rich in practical wisdom for the minute affairs of practical life. It abounds in apt and pointed suggestions and pungent warnings concerning our companionship, our personal habits, our employments, our management of finance, our speech, the government of tongue and temper, and many other such things, which daily perplex the earnest soul, and daily occasion harm to the thoughtless and misguided." Years earlier, another eminent American, Washington Irving, used what is the keynote of the book in an earnest talk with George Bancroft, later the historian of his country, then a student in Europe. The two were taking a walking excursion, when the older man said something the student remembered all his life. It was natural, then, that Bancroft's biographer should give this in his subject's own words, in "Life and Letters of George Bancroft:"