In January 1838, when Abraham Lincoln was a member of the Illinois state legislature and two weeks shy of his 29th birthday, he delivered what was probably the most prophetic speech of his political career.

The Lyceum Address is named for the Springfield, Illinois, association that, according to Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, "contained and commanded all the culture and talent of the place"?

It concerns "the perpetuation of our political institutions." Why would that matter in the still-young, ever-expanding American republic.

Lincoln's answer is the rise of the "mobocratic spirit" and the sorts of leaders who abet it.

The motive of the Vicksburg mob, in Lincoln's telling, is public virtue.

The high-minded yearning for moral purification and the low-minded lust for blood are, in Lincoln's telling, two sides of the same coin, and the effects are the same.

"The lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice." Normally law-abiding people, losing faith in government, "are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose." Men of low scruples and overweening ambitions scout their political opportunities.

Trump was a political arsonist who managed, in his inveterately asinine way, to burn down his own presidency.

Donald Trump is not a man of "the loftiest genius." He is, as I've written before, a political arsonist who managed, in his inveterately asinine way, to burn down his own presidency while attempting to torch everyone and everything else.

Lincoln's answer in the Lyceum Address is what he calls "political religion," built on pillars "hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason." Scholars have noted a tension between Lincoln's passionate faith in reason and a political faith that must be sustained by passions that reach beyond reason — what he later called "the mystic chords of memory.".