In 1863 Abraham Lincoln called the nation to repentance, confession
of our national sins and turning back to God. We believe America,
more than ever, needs to do this again. Seven months prior to his
Proclamation for a National Day of Thanksgiving, Abraham Lincoln
issued the following:
A Proclamation for a National Day of Prayer
Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing
the supreme authority and just government of the Almighty God in
all the affairs of men and of nations has by a resolution requested
the president to designate and set apart a day for national prayer
and humiliation.
And whereas, it is the duty of nations as well
as of men to own 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
only are blessed whose God is the Lord:
And insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like individuals
are subjected 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 but 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 choices 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 land 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 who made us:
It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power,
to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
All this being done in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly
in the hope authorized by the divine teachings, that the united
cry of the nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings
no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration
of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition
of unity and peace.