It is a great joy of life to believe this, that what Isaiah said is true through all the ages, by the very principle of the life of God, that no word of His will come back to Him vain or be void, that it will accomplish the thing He pleases and prosper in the errand whereon He sent it. I received a letter the other day from a friend, the Rev. Adolphus Pieters, who is a missionary in Japan. He had for very many years been engaged in an interesting work. He published advertisements of Christianity in the Japanese papers, and then occasionally printed a brief attractive account of what Christianity was, with the hope of arousing the curiosity of Japanese readers. At the end he would add that if any one were interested he might correspond with him. As a result of this work he came into correspondence with hundreds of men. In this recent letter he writes: “The total number of people who applied to us for tracts last year was 959, making the total from February, 1914, when the work began, to December 31, 1915, 3,590. There have been seven baptisms since my previous letter, and the total number to date is forty-five. Number Forty-Five is a most instructive case of the Lord’s blessing resting upon what was, humanly speaking, a complete failure. The young man in question is a bright young student in the Normal School at this place, who was baptized a week ago last Sunday, after coming to my house off and on for two years, and getting a good deal of instruction. I did not reckon him among the results of the newspaper work, but after he was baptized he told me that he originally got interested in the Gospel when he was attending the primary school in his home town. Among his teachers was one named Okabe Katsumi, who had seen our advertisements and secured some tracts, among which were copies of the Gospels. He did not care for them himself, and had given them to this boy, who was deeply impressed. In the course of time the boy graduated from school and went to Oita to attend the Normal, and he did so with the resolution already formed to look up the man who advertised in the papers and learn from him more about the Christian religion. “When I heard that, I looked up the card index, and found among the 4 ‘dead’ cards one for Okabe Katsumi. It was number 444, and he had applied for tracts in the spring of 1912, but in August he wrote that he had found something in our tracts that he did not like, and so had made up his mind to have nothing more to do with Christianity. So his card was marked in red ink, ‘Closed August 12, 1913,’ and filed away among the ‘dead’ ones――a complete failure, so far as any one could see. But it wasn’t a failure. God knew better. On the fifth of March, 1916, a young man made public confession of his faith and was baptized as a sequel to that application of Okabe Katsumi in 1912.