Signs of the Times

An editorial in the Christian Advocate Chicago, Illinois

"We feel the need for spiritual uplift," is the way a sixteen-year-old athlete ... explains the fact that hundreds of students in six high schools at Columbus, Ohio, begin school days with prayer meetings. "We feel that the only salvation for the world is through religion. Anyone who can read a newspaper can see that every other method of bringing peace to the world is failing."

It all began when [this boy], who is a minister's son, came home from New York City, where he had met other students who were holding prayer meetings. He found half a dozen boys who felt as he did, and together they found a minister who said they could use his church for their meetings. When cold weather came and the church was not always open, they began meeting in the churchyard.

Then it was that they approached [the] principal of [a] school, with the request that they be permitted to meet in the school building. He agreed. Afterward he explained, "You can't turn down a youngster when he is trying to improve himself spiritually."

School administrators in other places to which the movement soon spread felt the same way about it. The only rule they have imposed is the requirement that the meetings be interdenominational, with no connection with a specific church, and that the students themselves provide the leadership without outside speakers.

The leadership changes with each meeting. One member of the group reads a chapter of Scripture. There are prayers and hymns. Frequently, testimonials are given. Students get up and tell what God means to them, and how He helps them.

We don't know what those unshakable opponents of religion in public schools think of the idea, but we. like it. When students want to solve their problems—personal, social, and international—by prayer, we are for the idea. We think it is an idea whose time has come.

Dr. Ralph W. Decker in a speech reported in the Record Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

We need idealistic scientists, Scientists with ideals that are higher than [natural] science and know how.... Educational idealism that sees that character is higher than formula, that recognizes that knowledge is power; industrial enterprise shot through with idealism, democratic politicians who are servants of their fellow men, who put democratic procedure into real effect....

I suggest the age-old ingredient of a God-centered religious idealism. The idealism that believes in a Being beyond this world; a reasonable God, a thinking God, a caring God, a willing God, our own will interlined with the will and action of God. It would give us God-giving scientists, educators who would teach education shot through with idealism, big business men, industrial leaders who will see tasks as sons of God; political leaders as servants of God; it would end our restless search for that new and better world.

From an editorial in the Methodist, Sydney New South Wales, Australia

Prayer, of course, is not a talisman. There is nothing magical about it. It accomplishes nothing whatever when it is offered in a purely formal and perfunctory way.... We have it on the authority of Shakespeare that "words without thoughts never to heaven go," and ages before Shakespeare was born the Psalmist had said, with undoubted truth, "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me."

Prayer is not simply begging for things, nor is it a human device for inducing God to do what He has no mind to do. The essence of it is communion with God, and such communion is never one-sided. God speaks to us ... whenever we really speak to Him. We never do speak to Him when we merely gabble off a string of words and phrases, however sacred such words and phrases may be in themselves. We only truly speak to God when in real earnestness and in deep devotion we pour out our hearts before Him.

Canon J. P. Hodges, M. A., O. C. F. in a letter in the Parish Magazine Falmouth, Cornwall, England

These are days when religion is calling us to make a deliberate effort to appreciate the things of God, in a world where we can all too easily forget them.... Paul, closely following his Master, calls us to take into our reckoning whatever things are true, worthy, just, pure, and of excellence and merit. This is one of the foremost things of value which Christianity offers us and by which it can help the world of today.

To find time to be quiet and reflective, to allow our minds to dwell upon lovely things and lovely deeds, to encourage ourselves to appreciate goodness and grace, to rest the eye of faith upon God's majesty—in short, to come apart and rest awhile in this realm of spiritual realities, this is to begin to worship. And this, too, is reverence, which is the music of the soul.

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