Mr. Lincoln and God's Place in the Public Square

Mr. Lincoln has been all the vogue this past week and today, as we seek a new beginning as a nation, I couldn't help but recall his call to prayer in March of 1863.  Six months before the Emancipation Proclamation, the President look to God as the source of our collective blessing and future salvation. 

“We have been the receipients 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 self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too pround 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.”

May we have the grace and wisdom to do the same.