Abe Lincoln’s Lessons in Theology
It
was Abraham Lincoln who inaugurated our modern national tradition of a November
Thanksgiving observance, which has been annually reaffirmed ever since by
Presidential Proclamation. In his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, Mr.
Lincoln called upon the Nation to engage in “…humble penitence for our
national perverseness and disobedience…” This powerful demand for
nationwide repentance is highly reminiscent of his earlier proclamation of that
same year, calling for a day of “National prayer and humiliation.” In
that document, he states:
“And, insomuch as 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 but 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 behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess
our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
A. Lincoln, 1863
Note: If this was Mr. Lincoln’s message unto his own
generation, one can scarcely imagine what he would say unto us—the “entitlement”
generation!
