At the height of the War between the states, in his Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting Humiliation and Prayer, Abraham Lincoln addressed the spiritual amnesia that was spreading across America. Hear his words.

"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."

When crime of all kinds is escalating at an alarming rate in this country, and corrupt politicians and bad governmental bureaucrats greedily clamor for the number one position in all areas of Government, I wonder where is the America that was so blessed in the past?

I think I know the answer to what happened to America the Great. According to the words of a Frenchman of the last century, Alexis de Tocqeville, we see what caused the decline of America.

"I sought for the key to the greatness of America in her harbors....; in her fertile fields and boundless forest; in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her public school systems and institutions for learning. I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. American is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

Can you imagine the founding Fathers of this nation rolling over in their graves if they could sit in the counsels of Congress now, and see all the bickering and scandal and observe some of the culprits that are directing America? They would be horrified at the laws passed, and the rights that have been taken away from America's citizenry.

Many claim today, that this nation was never intended to be a Christian nation, and that the Constitution was not to promote Christianity. Let's hear some of the words of America's founders and Presidents, who by the way, were smarter than any we have in the halls of Congress today.

Lester Roloff described America like this---America--an insane asylum run by the inmates.

Patrick Henry, one of America's greatest Baptist American patriots, answered the question about the fall of America over 200 years before it happened. Here are his words: "Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of free men. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains."

"The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God." Psalms 9:17

In 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon "Sinners in the hands of an angry God," to a congregation in Enfield Connecticut. Men cried out for mercy as he described their terrible predicament. A small portion of that sermon follows. "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked...You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder..: "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish".