"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
preserves 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
sins,
and to pray for clemency and forgiveness." President
Abraham
Lincoln