Lincoln's Thanksgiving Declaration
We talked about this this morning: Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation, from 1863. We were flooded with calls to post this, so here you go.
It's very easy to say, "This country needs to turn back to God!" It's another thing, entirely, to say, "My heart needs turned back to God."
I love how Lincoln links our own personal rebellion with large-scale thanklessness, and, in turn, he links humility with gratefulness:
ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION - 1863
"It is the duty of nations as well as of men to owe their
dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their
sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured
hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon;
and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy
Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are
blessed whose God is the Lord.
We know that by His divine law, nations, like
individuals, are subject to punishments and chastisements in
this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of
civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment
inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins; to the needful
end of our national reformation as a whole people?
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, and 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 to feel the necessity of redeeming
and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made
us.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be
solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one
heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do
therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the
United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are
sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last
Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to
our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."
