Shortly before he proclaimed Thanksgiving a National Holiday,
Abraham Lincoln said:
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven.
We have been preserved, the 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 God that made us! “
