Give thanks to God this holiday
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Editor,
I am concerned that America is drifting further away from the spiritual values that blessed and perhaps preserved our country two centuries ago. In 2008, a news commentator said that the new president-elect was using the same tactic as Lincoln did in forming his cabinet: bringing around him those who had opposed his election.
Perhaps our prayers for the president-elect should also include asking that President Obama might have the same reliance upon God that Lincoln expressed in his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863:
“It is the duty of nations as well as 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 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 as strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, 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 dwells in the heavens.”
Harvey A. Town
Polson
