North Carolina Baptist editor J. D. Hufham of the Biblical Recorder today addresses Confederate President Jefferson Davis‘ proclamation of a national day of fasting and prayer — to be held August 21 — and blames last month’s battlefield defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg on various sins of the Confederacy.
The President has recommended Friday the 21st instant, as a day of fasting and prayer to be observed by the people of the Confederate States. We need not express our gratification at this recommendation of our chief Magistrate, or give utterance to the hope that it will be universally observed.–We could wish that it might have a more faithful and extensive observance than it will receive. Critical as is our condition, and great as is the need of earnest and united prayer, there are many who will disregard this call to it.
Had more of the spirit of prayer prevailed among our people the calamities from which they now suffer and the dangers which threaten them might have been averted.–God has been chastening them for their sins and he has applied the rod much more lightly than they had any reason to expect.
A long and uninterrupted series of brilliant successes had brought with it its usual train of evils. We had become forgetful of God, confident in our strength and proud and boastful. God does not suffer such a spirit to remain long unpunished among His people. He takes his own methods of humbling them and that right speedily. This we have learned by sad experience, more than once during the progress of the present struggle. The lesson fading from our memory, each time, with the disasters which enforced it, we need to have it taught us again and again.
The sense of security inspired by our recent victories and the prospect of an early peace developed a spirit of speculation and a thirst for wealth which was not only painful but alarming to contemplate. Not only men of the world but many professors of religion also had been swept into the vortex, and indications of that sordid avarice which we have so bitterly and unsparingly condemned in our enemies were becoming common among us. God has taught us anew the sinfulness of such a course and reminded us of its folly.
But time would fail us to recount all the sins of this nation, for which we have merited the chastisement of Him who ruleth in righteousness. They will readily present themselves to each one who will bestow a moment’s reflection on the subject. Let us hope that the present opportunity for confessing our transgressions and imploring pardon and returning to a faithful discharge of our duties, will not pass by unimproved. Let the respective congregations repair to their places of worship at the time appointed, there to humble themselves before God and plead for the restoration of His favor. Let the preachers, too, repair to their pulpits on that day, not to give a recital of the outrages and wrongs of our enemies against us and to denounce them for it, but to remind their flocks of their own sins against the Lord of hosts and seek to lead them to penitence and greater watchfulness and diligence for the future. Let us do this and we believe that the great Ruler of nations will smile propitiously on us, and speedily again grant us the light of victory.
As always, the institution of slavery is not included amongst the sins of the South.
Source: “Fast Day,” Biblical Recorder, August 12, 1863 (link)
