Then suddenly a new party and a new Lincoln were born on the same day in 1856 at a great meeting in Bloomington, Illinois.  There his soul was to come into its stateliest mansion out of its lower vaulted past.  For him the fulness of time had arrived.  He was prepared for it.  His intellect had also reached the fulness of its power.  Now his great right hand was ready for the thunderbolts which his spirit had been slowly forging.  God called him in the voices of the crowd.  He was quick to answer.  He went up the steps to the platform.  I saw, as he came forward, that he had taken the cross upon him.  Oh, it was a memorable thing to see the smothered flame of his spirit leaping into his face.  His hands were on his hips.  He seemed to grow taller as he advanced.  The look of him reminds me now of what the famous bronze founder in Paris said of the death-mask, that it was the most beautiful head and face he had ever seen.  What shall I say of his words save that it seemed to me that the voice of God was in them?  I never saw an audience so taken up and swept away.  The reporters forgot to report.  It is a lost speech.  There is no record of it.  I suppose it was scribbled with a pencil on scraps of paper and on the backs of envelopes at sundry times, agreeably with his habit, and committed to memory.  So this great speech, called by some the noblest effort of his life, was never printed.  I remember one sentence relating to the Nebraska bill: 

“Let us use ballots, not bullets, against the weapons of violence, which are those of kingcraft.  Their fruits are the dying bed of the fearless Sumner, the ruins of the Free State Hotel, the smoking timbers of the Herald of Freedom, the Governor of Kansas chained to a stake like a horse-thief.”

In June, 1858, he took the longest step of all.  The Republican State Convention had endorsed him for the United States Senate.  It was then that he wrote on envelopes and scraps of paper at odd moments, when his mind was off duty, the speech beginning: 

  “A house divided against itself must fall.  Our Government can not long
  endure part slave and part free.”

I was among the dozen friends to whom he read that speech in the State House library.  One said of those first sentences:  “It is a fool utterance.”  Another:  “It is ahead of its time.”  Another declared that it would drive away the Democrats who had lately joined the party.  Herndon and I were the only ones who approved it.

Lincoln had come to another fork in the road.  For a moment I wondered which way he would go.

Immediately he rose and said with an emphasis that silenced opposition: 

“Friends, this thing has been held back long enough.  The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered, and if it is decreed that I shall go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth.”