President Clinton talked about world peace at the 47th annual National Prayer Breakfast last week -- as well he ought, having brought along for the occasion Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian leader's unrepented involvement with the murder of Leon Klinghoffer aboard the Achille Lauro in 1985 and innumerable other acts of terrorism over his long career caused several invited religious leaders and members of Congress to boycott the bacon and exhortation. They missed a Clinton performance that deserves not to slip away unremarked. Of course last year's Prayer Breakfast speech -- what connoisseurs call the "Croissants I've Had to Bear" address -- set a standard that may never be topped, as the president laid out the steps he planned to take to atone for his adultery: "First, I will instruct my lawyers. . . . " (That breakfast is the subject of a recently issued theologians' manifesto and set of essays, which THE SCRAPBOOK recommends highly: Judgment Day at the White House: A Critical Declaration Exploring Moral Issues and the Political Use and Abuse of Religion, edited by Gabriel Fackre and published by Eerdman's.)

But this year's breakfast was not without its delights. Most remarkable was when the president declared Nazism a species of Christianity: "I do believe that even though Adolf Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity, God did not want him to prevail, but I also know that when we take up arms or words against one another, we must be very careful in invoking the name of our Lord." The claim that Hitler had anything but hatred and contempt for all forms of Christianity is a slander, probably originating in the president's ongoing project to apologize for everything except his own actions. (See Max Schulz's "Apologies to Our Enemies" on page 26 for the latest installment.) But, even leaving aside the slur against his own religion, Clinton seemed to imply that it was all right to disagree -- as though, Who's to say? Maybe God was on Hitler's side and we'd sure better not say He was on ours.

Then there was the moment when the president quoted St. Paul. The passage is from Romans 8:26 -- "we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words" -- which Clinton used as a proof text for his claim that we can never know the will of God sufficiently to use God's name in going to war. The reader who thinks it unfair to point out that the very next verse says the opposite -- "And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God" -- will probably also think unfair THE SCRAPBOOK's suggestion that the president look a little earlier in that chapter of Romans for some revelation: "For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh. . . . For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law, indeed it cannot."