Whats the origin of the phrase “last, best hope for..”?
grumblebee writes “On the other hand, maybe there really IS a meaning and I just don’t get it. But I don’t think gelcap is quite on target.” Ok, grumblebee: The “hope” is to achieve a polity (a civil society, a nation) in accord with the Will of Divine Providence; that is, a society mundi (of this world) that operates according to the ideal of God or something like God. I’m being deliberately vague on the exact aims, as they have changed over time. The “last” is temporal: there have been a series of attempts to build res publica in mundum (Latin: “the public thing in the world”) which would also be theologically sound, where a devout man could be “in the world” AND “of it”, all of which have failed up to now. In the American Exceptionalist dialog that Lincoln’s referencing, which is at least implicitly Protestant and Calvinist, the series is basically this: * Eden — which fails due t
