Article June 20, 1903 Issue

The Right to Pray

John L. Rendall

Keokuk (Ia.) Gate City

In this day and age of progressive thought, new and wonderful things are coming to the surface. Old ideas are being discarded and relegated to obscurity and newer and better ones substituted in lieu thereof. Progress is imperative. It recognizes no limitation. It is the activity of the ever unfolding ideas of Truth, which, regardless of the impediments of timid conservatism or ignorant prejudice and misapprehension of its blessings to humanity, ever manifests its beneficent influence and sweeps onward to success. God's law has so ordained it, and that which in its nature and effect opposes progress in any line must inevitably yield.

The Christian ministers of our country offer up prayer for the safety and well-being of their congregation, the city, state, and government officials, and all those in whom they have an interest. If perchance those prayers should be answered and some individual healed thereby, would this be inimical to public health? It would be a long stretch of the imagination so to declare; and yet, if there is not a reasonable expectancy of the prayer being answered, why waste time in praying? Christian Scientists believe that "with God all things are possible," and with Isaiah they say, "Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear." In their expectancy that God will hear and answer right prayer, they are sustained by the teachings of Scripture and by the fundamental truth underlying the Christian religion. It is their recognition of the need for health which impels them to ask for it. They recognize that to the mortal or human sense of things, sin, disease, and death are very real, therefore dangerous, factors in human experience in the sense that Paul said, "To be carnally [or mortally] minded is death."

To assume that "prayer is inimical to public health," practically amounts to a denial of the fundamental and eternal truths of the Christian religion, as taught by Jesus Christ and the whole Scriptures; to discriminate against the prayers of Christian Scientists and forbid such prayer, is unconstitutional. The Constitution of the United States guarantees equal rights and religious liberty; our dollars say, "In God We Trust," and the United States Supreme Court has said, per Mr. Justice Brewer, in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U. S. Reports, p. 457, "No purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, state or national, because this is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour [1891], there is a single voice making this affirmation. ... If we examine the constitutions of the various states, we find in them a constant recognition of religious obligations. Every constitution of every one of the forty-four states contains language which, either directly or by clear implication, recognizes the profoundest reverence for religion, and assumes that its influence in all human affairs is essential to the well-being of humanity."

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