Remarks to Members of the Associated Church Press.

Dr. Pruden:

I appreciate your remarks, and I hope that I have not been a liability to the First Baptist Church.

You know, the President has to be very careful, when he goes to church, that he goes to church for the purpose of worshiping God and not for the purpose of being a circus. A great many people, if they find that the President, not Harry Truman, but the President, is going to be in church, they will go to church. Well, that is not the right frame of mind in which to go to church, and I don't cater to that sort of program. I go because I want to go and because I think I ought to go, and not for the purpose of making a show. The First Baptist Church treats me just the way I want to be treated.

I can't go every Sunday, because the burdens of this office are so great that I have to put in an average of 16 or 17 hours a day in order to keep abreast of what is going on.

I am glad to welcome you here to this Capital City, and I hope that you have had a constructive and helpful meeting, and that you will continue to have a successful press that will tend to improve the moral standards of the United States of America and of the world.

We are working for permanent peace in the world. We have no ambitions to control any country or to tell any country how it ought to run its internal affairs. We believe in freedom of expression, in freedom of worship, and the right to go where we please, if it does not injure anybody else when we do that. That's all in the world that the foreign policy of the United States amounts to.