This is a prayer for the United Nations offered by John Golden, New York City Chairman of United Nations Day on the fifth anniversary of the United Nations, 24 October 1950. Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the National Citizens Committee for United Nations Day, mentioned the prayer in her diary entry for 24 October:

I particularly want to speak of the amount of work done here in New York City by John Golden, who is City Chairman of United Nations Day. An extremely busy man, he accepted this post only because of his belief that the U.N. must be strong in order to help us achieve a peaceful world. Mr. Golden has written an excellent leaflet called, “Why I Am for the United Nations,” which I would like to see distributed all over the United States. He has stimulated among the New York City schoolchildren an essay contest on the subject of “U.N. & U = Peace.” He has thought up innumerable ways of making us conscious of our responsibility. He has written a play about our earliest hero in the fight for freedom of religion, John Brown of Flushing, Long Island. He has written a prayer which I hope will be said not only here but in the hearts of many people for days to come. Tomorrow I shall put it in my column in full.

In her column the following day, Eleanor Roosevelt included a text of the prayer which, besides introducing some elipses (likely a record of oral pauses in the prayer as read aloud), unfortunately failed to credit Golden. She wrote:

Here is the prayer that was said on United Nations Day here in New York City, but I hope you will not forget it in the other days throughout the year:

[…]

Saying this prayer may be one way of reminding us that we, in the democracies, have a fight to wage — a fight to wage for peace.

There are many ways in which we can do this. One is by being prepared in a military way. This we do in the hope that whoever is thinking of attacking us will think twice and decide it is not worth the price.

A second way is to try to use our resources in conjunction with the other nations of the world to help them develop their resources and thereby raise the standard of living and make life more worth living. People who are happy and well fed are much less willing to fight a war.

A third way is to live our lives as nearly as possible on the pattern set down for us by Christ so many years ago. This effort will remove many causes of war, and it is toward strengthening our will to do this that I think this prayer may be useful.

I hate to see the way we are going to be obliged to turn our minds to self-preservation in case of atomic warfare. However, those precautions must be taken since we live in a world in which the secrets of the atom are known and can be used either to make life better or to destroy it completely.

I have just received advance copies of a book which will be published on Oct. 27, and will be available in two different editions. It is called, “How to Survive an Atomic Bomb,” and is edited by the combet forces and press and the Rinehart Co. I am sure it will hold your attention.

The copy we have transcribed is as found in the World Alliance News Letter, vol. 26, issue 9 (Nov 1950), the one source which clearly credited Golden. The prayer as published by Eleanor Roosevelt was redistributed by the American Association for the United Nations, which eventually made its way in the unpublished CCAR Union Anthology of 1966.

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