Henderson Daily Dispatch

SAYS TRUE PRAYER
MORE UNDERSTOOD
Modern View of It To Ask
Strength To Live Well,
Preacher Asserts

True prayer is better understood today, and consists in the asking for strength "to live well," Dr. J. M. Culbreth, said in his sermon at the First Methodist church yesterday morning:

Dr. Culbreth divided his time with Mr. Page, a representative of the United Dry Forces of North Carolina, who spoke on the temperance situation, and said that the need at present was for a teaching of the evils of strong drink, that the public might be educated as to its tragic effects.

In his sermon, Dr. Culbreth said, in part:

"A brilliant young author has recently arraigned all of us as "Commonplace Prodigals" because we want only waste the power of prayer. Most of our prayers, he said, are caricatures. We so habitually pray for "vain things," "fond things," "ill things," as Edith Thomas charges in "A Far Cry to Heaven," and miss entirely the great endowments which prayer is designed to bestow.

"While this indictment is justified in the case of quite too many of us, nevertheless there is something about modern prayer at its best that is positively uplifting and creative. A century ago men were praying God to open doors, to snatch a few lost souls as brands from the burning, to save his chosen people and destroy their enemies. Today they are praying God to show them the "path of justice for the weak," to supply them with the resources necessary for great enterprises, and to unite their hearts in appreciation of man as man and in the noble purpose to accomplish his redemption.

"True prayer is more clearly understood today than ever before. And there is more of it. It is characterized by a dominant desire to achieve some high and useful end, by unquestioning acknowledgement of a "power not ourselves that makes for righteousness," and by unflagging effort to carry on the creative work of God in making a new world.

"An example of this kind of prayer is the following, uttered by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick at the close of one of his sermons: 'Eternal God, Who has put us in a stern and demanding world, we do not ask for an easier world to live in but we do ask for spiritual competence to live well, strengthened with might, by God's Spirit in the inner man. Amen.'"