Read the following passage and then respond to the question below:
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall .. but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other. -Lincoln
Why might Lincoln have used a biblical allusion referring to a divided house in his speech?
He wanted to emphasize that the North and South must work together in order to preserve our country, drawing importance to it using the authority of
religion
He believed the North and the South needed religion in order to survive.
He was revealing that the North and the South should never be able to work together as they are divided into two houses.
He wanted to further divide the North and South, keeping them separate.

Match the definition to the word for a better understanding of the paragraph. 1 money does not buy happiness or security. 2john ringling, one of the five brothers of the ringling brothers circus, started out in 1884 with a trained horse and a performing bear. 3for over forty years, he worked hard at the family enterprise, bought up smaller circuses, and imported new acts. 4in the 1920s, he was rated as one of the world's wealthiest men and owned every sizable circus in the country. 5over 5,000 people were on his payroll, and over 240 railroad cars were in his retinue each time the circus moved. 6at the time of his death, however, he was a nervous, unhappy man; he was also bankrupt and beset by lawsuits. 7his carefully built circus empire passed into alien hands. 8all those years of work had turned to dust. 1. business organization alien 2. group beset 3. without funds to pay debts retinue 4. troubled or harassed enterprise 5. strange; belonging to another person, place, country, or thing bankrupt