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this complete faith in God, that God was guiding him, God would look out for him and that at every juncture of life, important or unimportant, you turned to God and asked for help. You had help. Whatever happened was all right because it was the will of God. You would find some way out of it by God's guidance. You had a sense of security. This was what Harry laid Roosevelt's sense of security to. He too longed for some kind of a religious basis.
I think he more or less adopted a religious outlook, partly secondhand. At the time of, and right after, his second wife's, Barbara Duncan, death in 1937 he accepted at secondhand, without any personal experience of religion or personal conversion, this sense of security in religion. I think he accepted secondhand the religious faith of people he thought well of. For instance, all the time that Barbara was in her last illness I had prayers said for Barbara in church. I told Harry about it naturally, and it was a curiously strange comfort to him, although he knew, I knew and Barbara knew that she was doomed. She had cancer in its last stages, but Harry accepted the idea that prayers for the sick need not necessarily heal them of their illness, but healed them of their confusion, their fear and their lack of
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