Lincoln Proclaims National Fast Day

Lincoln Proclaims National Fast Day

Abraham Lincoln wrote an address to the nation during the Civil War that was at least as important as the Gettysburg Address.

It was his proclamation for a national fast-day, by which he did designate and set apart Thursday the 30th day of April 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer.

Lincoln wrote: "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.

"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.

"Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity, 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."

-The Bible Friend

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