Thanksgiving Day

Heroes of Faith

by Edgar De Witt Jones

By faith the voyaging Mayflower embarked
from Old England and found harbor off the
bleak New England shores.

By faith the Pilgrim Fathers set up a government
on a new continent dedicated to God and
inspired by a desire to do his will on earth as it is
done in heaven.

By faith Thomas Jefferson was stirred to strike a
blow for political independence and wrote the
thrilling document that declared that all men are
created equal and endowed with certain
inalienable rights.

By faith he said, "Love your neighbor as
yourself and your country more than yourself."

By faith George Washington left his spacious
mansion at Mount Vernon and espoused the
cause of the tax-burdened colonists.

By faith he forsook ease and comfort, choosing
rather to suffer hardship with his men at Valley
Forge than to enjoy the favor of a king.

By faith he became the President of the newly
born republic and endured as seeing Him who is
invisible.

By faith Alexander Hamilton established the
financial credit of the nation. In the eloquent
words of Daniel Webster: "He touched the
corpse of public credit and it sprang into life.
He smote the rock of national resources and
abundant streams of revenue flowed."

By faith James Madison gave richly of his
scholarly mind to form the Federal Constitution.

By faith Andrew Jackson fought the battle of the
impoverished and underprivileged many against
the privileged few.

By faith Abraham Lincoln bore the awful burden
of four purgatorial years seeking to preserve the
Federal Union.

By faith he carried a dreadful war to its
conclusion without hate in his heart, saying, "I
have not only suffered for the South, I have
suffered with the South."

By faith Woodrow Wilson in the dreadful
heartbreak of a world war dreamed a dream of a
war less world in which the nations should be
leagued together to keep the peace.

By faith he glimpsed that promised land which,
like Moses, he might not enter. And what shall I more say?

For time would fail me if I should tell of that unnumbered host,
the unnamed and obscure citizens who bore
unimagined burdens, sacrificed in silence and
endured nobly, that a government of the people,
for the people, and by the people might not
perish from the earth.

Only by faith in God has all of this been possible, lets remember to give God thanks today for all that he has done for us and this nation.

Happy Thanksgiving!