Whereas, the Senate of the United States devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation:
And whereas, 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 Lord.
And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisement 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.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request and fully concurring in the view of the Senate, I do, by this proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer.
And I do hereby request all the people to abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high and answered with blessing no less than the pardon of our national sins and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. By the President: Abraham Lincoln.
Just two months later, General Robert E. Lee marched into Pennsylvania with 76,000 Confederate troops. There was great panic throughout the cities and countryside. Lincoln later recalled,
When everybody seemed panic-stricken, and nobody could tell what was going to happen, I went to my room one day, and locked the door, and got down on my knees before Almighty God, and prayed to Him mightily. And afterward (I don’t know how it was, and I can’t explain it), soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul that God Almighty had taken the whole business into His own hands (Hyatt, 1726: The Year that Defined America, 186-87).
The Union forces won a resounding victory at Gettysburg and this proved to be the turning point of the War. Some would suggest that the Union’s victory at Gettysburg was coincidental, but the fact that it occurred on the heels of the national day of repentance, prayer and fasting, would suggest Divine intervention.
Lincoln’s amazing experience in prayer just before the battle also indicates that God intervened. One writer surmised that, in fact, the North did not win the Civil War, but rather, that prayer won the war. It happened because America remembered her heritage. She remembered 1726.
This article is derived from Dr. Eddie Hyatt's latest book, 1726: The Year that Defined America, available from Amazon and his website at www.eddiehyatt.com.
.....and on the same day as the Gettysburg victory ( July 4,1863) General Grant defeated the last remaining confederate stronghold on the Mississippi at Vicksburg. That action split the confederacy in two. So, on our nation’s birthday God gave two gifts ��. And to the south he gave a rebuke; what the rebs were trying to do to the USA God helped Grant do at Vicksburg. Sounds like God took note of the United prayers of a nation.
ReplyDeleteThanks Chuck!
DeletePresident Lincoln was a communist and follower of Karl Marx! Many people don’t know this! He failed five times to run for president because nobody wanted him and it wasn’t until the big banks of Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia and New York, got behind him and put $7 million in his campaign that he finally won! Then bankrupted, and he formed the Delaware corporation, and called himself commander in chief, and that’s why every president sense then has called themselves commander-in-chief! President Trump is the first man to restore the republic by executive order!
ReplyDeleteThe previous opinion shows a startling ignorance about the history of communism, which as a theory was hypothesized by Karl Marx, but never came into being until the Russian Revolution of 1917. To flippantly say that President Lincoln was a communist and a follower of Karl Marx is way off the mark. Perhaps Lincoln read the Manifesto and propounded some socialist ideals, but the true meaning of the word "communist" had not yet reached it's horrific maturity: complete totalitarianism, suppression of freedom of Religion, execution of masses of people who do not conform, and the development of concentration camps. Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, a communist? It's laughable if only it wasn't so sick of an assertion.
ReplyDelete