THE President, in his role of official high priest of this “Christian” Nation, has issued the following proclamation:—
The gifts of God to our people during the past year have been so abundant and so special that the spirit of devout thanksgiving awaits not a call, but only the appointment of a day when it may have a common expression. He has stayed the pestilence at our door; he has given us more love for the free civil institutions, in the creation of which his directing providence was so conspicuous; he has awakened a deeper reverence for law; he has widened our philanthropy by a call to succor the distress in other lands; he has blessed our schools and is bringing forward a patriotic and God-fearing generation to execute his great and benevolent designs for our country; he has given us great increase in material wealth, and a wide diffusion of contentment and comfort in the homes of our people; he has given his grace to the sorrowing.
Wherefore, I Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States, do call upon all our people to observe, as we have been wont, Thursday, the twenty-fourth day of this month of November, as a day of thanksgiving to God for his mercies and of supplication for his continued care and grace.
In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington this 4th day of November, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-two, and of the independence of the United States the one hundred and seventeenth.
By the President, BENJAMIN HARRISON.
JOHN W. FOSTER, Secretary of State.
IT is a little strange that while such proclamations are issued, professedly, because this is a “Christian” Nation, this particular proclamation, like many others before it, bears no internal evidence of being a Christian document, or that it is issued by a Christian ruler. The veriest pagan might be the author of such a proclamation. Deioces or Cyaxares might have issued a proclamation in the exact words of this one issued by the President of this “Christian” Nation, and nobody would have even suspected that it was not designed to honor the god of Persia.
If this is, as the Supreme Court holds that it is, a “Christian” Nation, the President certainly ought to issue Christian proclamations; if it is a pagan Nation, the proclamation in question will answer every purpose; but if the Nation is simply a civil government, organized for civil purposes, and as President Washington asserted, “is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion,” we should at once and forever be done with the force of professing something which only a small per centage of the people really feel, and which causes a professedly Christian man, an elder in a Christian church, to deny his Lord by issuing as a Christian act, a proclamation which fails to recognize our Lord even in the date which it bears.