Today is Thursday, November 25th, 2004; Karen's Korner #424

Today is Thanksgiving! Have a happy, happy day!!

Each year the president of the United States delivers a speech for Thanksgiving. Sometimes we hear it on the radio or television. Or we see it printed in the newspaper. Most times we don't know what he said.

This is Abraham Lincoln's for Thanksgiving in 1863 while we were still in the midst of the Civil War and our country was divided on more than one issue:

"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 beneficent Father Who
dwelleth in the heavens."

-- Abraham Lincoln, Thanksgiving proclamation, Oct. 3,
1863

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