mised 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:"

"At my time of life, he tells me, I ought to lay aside all care, and
only be bent on laying in a stock of knowledge for future application.
If I have not pecuniary resources enough to get at what I would wish
for, as calculated to be useful to my mind, I must still not give up the
pursuit. Still follow it; scramble to it; get at it as you can, but be
sure to get at it. If you need books, buy them; if you are in want of
instruction in anything take it. The time will soon come when it will be
too late for all these things."

More than a century ago an immigrant from Scotland landed in New York.
In the story of his life he later told how the book of Proverbs became
his rock. The first night he slept in an old frame building with a
shingle roof. During the night he was aroused by a storm of rain
accompanied by thunder and lightning such as he had never experienced in
Scotland. Homesick, terrified, unable to sleep, he rose and took from
his chest the Bible his father had carefully packed with his clothes. He
wrote later that as the book was opened, "My eyes fell on the