Quotes Lincoln on What Is Forgotten

To The Editor:

Encouraged by the letter of 12-29-30, written by Don Brockmiller, I’d like to quote the following.

“We have been the recipient 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 of these things 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.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“The plight of the world today and the victories of Satan in the world can be attributed to the single fact that we are relying too much on our own resources — ourselves, our sciences, our technologies — and not at all on prayer” (copied from my prayerbook, “Mary’s Call”).

Agnes Piontek

Washington