For an early example of this characteristic vision of his, we may go back to the speech delivered before the Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838. The opening is significant. “In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.”[110] So Lincoln takes as his point of perspective all time, of which the Christian era is but a portion; and the entire earth, of which the United States can be viewed as a specially favored part. This habit of viewing things from an Olympian height never left him. We might cite also the opening of the Speech at Peoria, and that of the Speech at the Cooper Union Institute; but let us pass on twenty-five years and re-read the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address. “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Again tremendous perspective, suggesting almost that Lincoln was looking at the little act from some ultimate point in space and time. “Fourscore and seven years ago” carries the listener back to the beginning of the nation. “This continent” again takes the whole world into purview. “Our fathers” is an auxiliary suggestion of the continuum of time. The phrase following defines American political philosophy in the most general terms possible. The entire opening sentence, with its sustained detachment, sounds like an account of the action to be rendered at Judgment Day. It is not Abe Lincoln who is speaking the utterance, but the voice of mankind, as it were, to whom the American Civil War is but the passing vexation of a generation. And as for the “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,” it takes two to make a struggle, and is there anything to indicate that the men in gray are excluded? There is nothing explicit, and therefore we may say that Lincoln looked as far ahead as he looked behind in commemorating the event of Gettysburg.