Listen to our first president,

George Washington, in his inaugural address to the congress as he stressed

God's role in the birth of this republic:

"No people can be bound

to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs

of men more than the people of the United States. Every step by which

they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to

have been distinguished by some token of providential agency ... We ought

to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of heaven cannot be

expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right,

which heaven itself has ordained."

One of the first official acts

of George Washington was the first Thanksgiving Proclamation, which reads,

"Whereas it is the

duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to

obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly implore His

protection and favor ..." It goes on to call on this nation to thankfulness

to Almighty God.

Consider the testimony of Abraham

Lincoln:

"It is the duty of

nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling

power of God and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy

Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed

whose God is the Lord."

Listen to what Noah Webster

had to say:

"The moral principles

and precepts contained in the scriptures ought to form the basis of all

our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evils which men

suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and

war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained

in the Bible."

On another occasion he said,

"The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion

of Christ and His apostles ... to this we owe our free constitutions of

government."

On April 30, 1863, President

Abraham Lincoln called for a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and

Prayer with the following proclamation:

"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 behooves

us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our

national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness."

Keith Turner

Fayetteville