[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 18 (Thursday, February 12, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Page S1195]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                                 prayer

  The guest Chaplain, Father Norman H. Elliott, All Saints Episcopal 
Church, Anchorage, AK, offered the following prayer:
  Almighty God, under whom our many States are one Nation, we honor on 
this day, Abraham Lincoln. We remember his words spoken on the 
battlefield of Gettysburg: ``Four score and seven years ago, our 
fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in 
liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created 
equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that 
nation--or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated--can long 
endure.''
  Today we are engaged in a war on terrorism, testing once again 
whether this Nation can endure. In these perilous times it is well that 
we remember the words of Lincoln as he left Springfield to become the 
President: ``I now leave . . . with a task before me greater than that 
which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine 
Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I 
cannot fail.'' Grant then, O God, Your assistance to the men and women 
called to the high office of Senator and the responsibilities entrusted 
to them in these grave hours. Give them the faith, wisdom, and courage 
they need to carry on and not fail. And bring soon, we pray, the day 
when these walls will resound, as they have in times past, with the 
shout of ``Victory'' and our Nation will again know peace and security 
and will endure.
  We ask this in Your holy Name. Amen.

                          ____________________