A Lament for America, July 4, 2008

Ah, America, what pride, luxury, lasciviousness, licentiousness, wantonness, drunkenness, cruelties, injustice, oppressions, fornications, adulteries, falsehood, hypocrisy, bribery, atheism, horrid blasphemies, and hellish impieties are now to be found rampant in the midst of thee! Ah America, America, how are the Lord’s sabbaths profaned, pure ordinances despised, scriptures rejected, the Spirit resisted and derided, the righteous reviled, wickedness countenanced, and Christ many thousand times in a day by these cursed practices afresh crucified. Ah, America, America, were our forefathers alive, how sadly would they blush to see such a horrid degenerate posterity, as is to be found in the midst of thee! How is our forefathers hospitality converted into riot and luxury, their frugality into pride and prodigality, their simplicity into subtilty, their sincerity into hypocrisy, their charity into cruelty, their chastity into chambering and wantonness, their sobriety into drunkenness, their plain dealing into dissembling, their works of compassion into works of oppression, and their love to the people of God, into an utter enmity against the people of God?

I have adapted this from Thomas Brooks’s The Privy (Secret) Key of Heaven, under heading 16: Consider, the times wherein we live call aloud for secret prayer. The only change I have made is to substitute “America” for Brooks’s “England.”