vantage ground

Your pilot, knowing that a run from here is a certainty, selects his vantage ground.

Had it become a dominant faith, moreover, it would have bred a sacerdotal class as privileged as the Catholic priesthood, for the “veneration” offered to the consecrated ministers as the tabernacles of the Holy Ghost shows us what vantage ground they would have had when persecution had given place to power, and carnal human nature had asserted itself in the ambitious men who would have sought its high places.

The successive failures, especially the last, gave the opposition great vantage ground in declaring against the scheme altogether.

Forgetting in her haste the dreaded reptiles, she flew quickly to the rocks above, where, having gained a vantage ground of comparative safety, she paused to mark the unaccustomed pageant below.

Science has so little to offer in support of any religious doctrine, and so much to advance against all purely theologic tenets, that we turn to a point giving the Christian greater vantage ground, and accepting for the moment his scriptures as our guide, we deny that he can maintain the possibility of Adam’s sin, and yet consistently affirm the existence of an all-wise, all-powerful, and all-good God.