THE LOST MEANING OF
THANKSGIVING
I had never once heard from the schools
why we celebrate Thanksgiving. I was told
that it was in celebration of our first feast
with the Native American Indians.
What an Honorable president!
Lincoln's
Thanksgiving
Proclamation
October 3, 1863
Abraham Lincoln
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 - October 3,
1863
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