During a great civil war, the nation faced a test of whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to human equality could endure. On a battlefield set aside in part as a final resting place for those who died so the nation might live, the living recognized that the soldiers who struggled there had already consecrated the ground by their sacrifice. Their deaths called the living to continue the unfinished work, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, and to resolve that they had not died in vain, that the nation would have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.