[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 1674-1675]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

                                 PRAYER

  The Chaplain, the Reverend Daniel P. Coughlin, offered the following 
prayer:
  Lord God of history and ever-present to our needs, this weekend the 
commemoration of President Abraham Lincoln's birth brought to mind 
stirring words he wrote in 1863:
  ``We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we 
have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have 
grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.
  ``But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand 
which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and 
strengthened us. We have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our 
hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom 
and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have 
become too self-sufficient, too proud to pray to the God that made 
us.''
  So it seems fitting and proper that God should today be solemnly, 
reverently, and gratefully acknowledged with one heart and one voice by 
the whole American people.
  Therefore, in that same Spirit and with the words of President 
Lincoln himself, ``I invite you my fellow citizens to thank and praise 
our gracious Father who dwells in the heavens'' and beg for God's 
continued hand of blessing upon our Nation.
  Amen.

[[Page 1675]]



                          ____________________