Lincoln--and Peace and Repentance

No matter what perplexing problems we face, it is somewhat reassuring, and also somewhat sobering, to look back to the counsel, to the principles and purpose with which others have faced crisis and confusion. With this in mind, may we turn today to some of the words of Abraham Lincoln, sampled from random sources, and uttered in a time of travail, when a nation was torn and tired and tested:
“It is difficult to make a man miserable,” he said, “while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.”
“Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good.”
“Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward…” “…devoutly recognizing… Almighty God in all the affairs of men and nations…. 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 transgression in humble sorrow … and to recognize the sublime truth…that ‘those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.'”
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven;…we have grown in number, wealth, and power…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…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 who 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…. All this being done in sincerity and truth,…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 blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins…. In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and…seal… (signed) Abraham Lincoln.”
Thank God for the life and memory of such men⎯and for the power of prayer and repentance⎯without which there is no peace.