Thanksgiving Proclamation

How many of you have read Abraham Lincoln's original Thanksgiving Proclamation? I recently read it and was amazed that what was written in 1863 applies even more so to our country today, and was challenged by what a powerful call this is to give thanks to God! So here it is for you to read with your family:

Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863 ~ Abraham Lincoln

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their own dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet recognize their 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 the awful cal;amity of civil war which now desolates the land and may be a punishment inflicted upon us for out 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, 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, but 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 the 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