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| Wealth and Want | |||||||
| ... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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Prayer
and Works
Henry George: Thy Kingdom Come (1889 speech) “Thy kingdom come!” When Christ
taught that prayer He
did not mean that humans should idly phrase these words, but that for
the coming of that kingdom humanity must work as well as pray!
Prayer! Consider what prayer is. How true is the old fable! The wagoner whose wagon was stuck in the rut knelt down and prayed to Jove to get it out. He might have prayed till the crack of doom, and the wagon would have stood there. This world — God’s world — is not a world in which the repeating of words will get wagons out of mire or poverty out of slums. We who would pray with effect must work! ... When we consider the
achievements of humanity and then look upon
the misery that exists today in the very centres of wealth; upon the
ignorance, the weakness, the injustice, that characterise our highest
civilisation, we may know of a surety that it is not the fault of
God; it is the fault of humanity. May we not know that in that very
power that God has given to His children here, in that power of
rising higher, there is involved — and necessarily involved
— the power of falling lower.
“Our Father!” “Our Father!”
Whose? Not my
Father — that is not the prayer. “Our Father” —
not the father of any sect, or any class, but the Father of all
humanity. The All- Father, the equal Father, the loving Father. He it
is we ask to bring the kingdom. Aye, we ask it with our lips! We call
Him “Our Father”, the All, the Universal Father, when we
kneel down to pray to Him. ... Read the whole
speech |
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Wealth
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www.wealthandwant.com
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... because democracy
alone hasn't yet led to a society in which all can
prosper
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