"It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord. We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of political strife which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?
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 has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole Malaysian people.
I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of Malaysia, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the 16th September (Malaysia Day) as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."
Abraham Lincoln - October 3, 1863 (Transposed to Malaysia’s perspective in italics).
Comment: If only our politicians and citizens can rise above the trivialities of today's politics and behold Lincoln's perspective of the nation as an individual, there is still hope for Malaysia. See how Lincoln's speech is as powerful a prayer for the nation as much as it is an appeal to the people of America to truthfully examine themselves before conscience and God.
2 comments:
hmm... would that solution exclude out Malaysian atheists or agnostics like Sim Kwang yang of Malaysiakini?
Don't know much about Sim Kwang Yang's beliefs but I am sure that, even if he is an atheist, he would have a conscience, or else he wouldn't be writing for Malaysiakini.
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