GOD AND GOVERNMENT II

The year was 1863, The United States of America was in crisis....

The Senate called upon President Lincoln to set aside a national day of "fasting, humiliation and prayer".
The President concurred and so designated April 30 as such, issuing the following proclamation:

"It is the duty of nations as well as of men," he said, " 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 repentence 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.

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, the 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 behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness."

April 30, 1863
President Abrham Lincoln