The words Abraham Lincoln . . .
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 are blessed whose God is the
Lord.
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 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 beneficient Father who
dwelleth in the heavens.