President Abraham Lincoln called for a day of fasting and prayer.
His declaration for a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer begins with this thought.
And in so much as we know that, by his divine law, nations, like individuals, are subject to the 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?
He went on to say.
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 made us
It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for the clemency and forgiveness.
He then set aside April 30, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer,
and asked people in our nation to abstain on that day from their
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