p. 10 | MISAPPLIED PRAYER by W. E. Cornell

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 19, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 12.

MISAPPLIED PRAYER.

By W. E. Cornell

BY W. E. CORNELL.

When our forefathers laid the foundation of this government, they builded wisely and well—even “better than they knew.” However, just as there were carried over from the Church of Rome into the Reformation of the sixteenth century certain usages and accepted doctrines not sanctioned by the word, so, in spite of the efforts of the framers of our national Constitution to create a government where the ecclesiastical and civil should be absolutely divorced, there have been allowed to creep in certain practices which are the legitimate fruits of a union of church and state. One of these is the maintenance of chaplaincies, not only in legislative bodies but in the army and navy as well. The idea seemed to prevail that “without some sort of alliance or coalition between government and religion, neither could be duly supported,” when the truth is that “religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.” True it is that both have a common origin—were ordained of God, but designed to occupy entirely different spheres, and this is in direct harmony with the teachings of Christ himself, as can be abundantly demonstrated. Separated, they are to man a blessing that only infinite wisdom could have devised; united, they become an engine of persecution and tyranny that only demons could invent.

It is not the design here to enter into an argument as to the evils of this coalition, but to remark that the fears expressed by such men as Madison, Jefferson, etc., who protested against the practice in their day, are in a large measure realized right before our very eyes. The offering of prayer at the opening of legislative and other political bodies has in many instances degenerated into a mere harangue in favor of this or that measure, wholly at variance with the office and spirit of prayer, as witness the recent newspaper accounts of the chaplain at our national Legislature, who prayed so fervently for the Cubans that the assembly broke out in a storm of applause. Not long since a minister who had been called upon to open a session of the state Legislature by prayer, remarked to the writer that, “aside from the honor conferred, I never earned five dollars easier.”

However, it is refreshing to know that once in a while there is a man with enough backbone to stand up and condemn the evil. A short time since the Virginia lawmakers called upon a Rev. C. J. Oelschlaeger, an English Lutheran minister, to act as chaplain the following week to open the proceedings of the body by prayer, to which he promptly replied by note, and which was read in open session by the clerk, as follows:—

“I do not believe in opening a promiscuous political body with prayer. The promiscuous character of the body makes it an abuse of prayer, and the political character of the body makes it an unnatural union of church and state. I, as a Christian, and any member of the body as a Christian, can privately pray for the session, but the state which that body represents has nothing to do with prayer.”

The above contains some very pointed and wholesome truths, and shows that the gentleman in question has pretty straight ideas on the subject of a union of church and state. We suppose he might have couched his refusal in words a trifle more tempered, and scored his point with a more diplomatic manner, but the incident, remarks one paper, “contains an obvious moral for other state assemblies who have drifted into the practice of treating this solemn invocation in their behalf as a perfunctory routine.” We are glad to note this tart and earnest protest against a manifest evil, for it shows there is still in the hearts of the people a jealousy for the principles which have made us as a nation great.

Des Moines, Iowa.