American theologian and author (1835-1922)
If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
There were lawyers who promoted quarrels to get fees. But they were the pariahs of the profession. The best lawyers were peacemakers, and though, of necessity, professional partisans when engaged in litigation, they were generally honorable partisans.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
It is not easy to formulate in a sentence that change which has come over my thought, and, as I believe, the thought of the present generation, respecting God's relation to man. Shall I say we are coming to think of God as dwelling in man rather than as operating on man from without? This might be taken to imply a denial or at least a doubt of God's personality, and of man's personality as distinct and separate from God's, and this implication I vigorously and energetically disavow. If I speak of God in man, it is as one speaks of one soul working within another, so that the two personalities intermingle, the two lives are intertwined. Perhaps it will be better to attempt no formal statement of the general principle; rather to illustrate it by special applications.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
As I look back, I can remember something of the view which it seems to me I held when I was entering into the ministry. It was something like this: There is a great and good God. He is somewhere in the centre of the universe — whether in the body or out of the body I knew not, and yet in my conception I embodied him. He is the creator and the ruler of the world. He had made the world. I conceived of him as making the world as an architect makes a building. I rather think somewhere, in some of my earlier sermons, that figure would be found worked out — he had turned it in a lathe; he had erected the pillars; he had woven the carpet of grass; he had ornamented it with the flowers. You have heard that from other ministers, and no doubt you would have heard it from me when I was a young man. And as I conceived of God creating the world as an engineer creates an engine, so also I conceived of him regulating this world as an engineer regulates the engine. When men said to me, "Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe that God has set aside natural law?" I said, " Oh, no, but he uses natural law. As an engineer uses the steam and the fire, or as an electric engineer uses the electricity, so God uses the forces of nature. He is in his engine, with his hand on the lever; he can add to its speed or he can diminish its speed, or he can halt it, or he can make it go backward, or he can turn it in the one direction or the other direction. He made the engine and he rules the engine." Something like that was my conception of God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Evolution is described by John Fiske as "God's way of doing things." Theology also may be described as an attempt to explain God's way of doing things. Thus, to a certain extent the science of evolution and the science of theology have the same ultimate end. Both attempt to furnish an orderly, rational, and self-consistent account of phenomena. The supposed inconsistency between science and religion is really an inconsistency between two sciences. The theologian and the scientist have given different, and to some extent inconsistent, accounts of God's way of doing things. It is important for us to know which account is correct. It is even religiously desirable that we should know, since our understanding of God's influence upon the human soul affects that influence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Did Adam fall, six thousand years ago? It is immaterial. Certainly if we found the story of a garden with one fruit by eating which a man would make himself immortal, and with another fruit which would give him a consciousness of good and evil, with a serpent which talked to him, and with a God who walked in the garden and from whom the man attempted to hide, — if we found that in Greek, or Roman, or Hindu, or Norse literature, we should say, That is beautiful fable; what truth can we find in it? And I do not see any reason why, finding it in Hebrew literature, we should not say, That is beautiful fable; what truth is in that fable?
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
I wish you could have seen that parsonage last Friday, the day that Mr. Mapleson and his wife were to arrive. The walks were trim. The plot before the piazza had been new sodded. The grapevine was already putting out new buds as if it felt the effect of the Deacon's tender care. There was not a weed to be seen. The beds, with their rich, black loam turned up to the sun, had a beauty of their own, which only one who loves to dig among flowers as much as I do can appreciate. Mr. Glazier had made the dingy old house look like a new one. After all there is nothing I like better for a cottage than pure white with green blinds. Inside we had a lovely carpet on the parlor, and the new set of imitation rosewood. A beautiful bouquet from Mrs. Wheaton's garden stood in the bay window, which looks out upon the river. My girl, lent for the occasion, was in the kitchen; and in the dining-room there was supper spread just for two, with cake, preserves, and pies enough in the closet (every body in the parish had sent in supper for that evening) to keep the parson supplied for a month at least. I was the last to leave the house, and I did not leave it till I heard the whistle of the train. Then I ran over to Miss Moore's little cottage, which is right across the way. Her parlor window was full of ladies peering out, first and foremost of whom was little Miss Flidgett, who thus gratified her wish to see how they would take it. The Deacon, who was fixing something about the stable, was almost caught. But he heard the carriage-wheels just in time to run into the shed, and I could see him there holding the door open a crack and peering out to see what passed. Even dignified Mrs. Wheaton could not resist the temptation to be passing along, accidentally of course, just as the parson drove up. Mr. Wheaton had called for them at the depot. It was arranged (with them, that is) that he was to take them right to our house, and they were to stay there till they could decide whether to board or keep house. He proposed to them, however, according to pre-arrangement, to stop a minute at the parsonage on the way. "Mrs. Mapleson," he said, "can see what it is and how she likes the house, and the location; and besides I have an errand to do at the store."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Conscience is what? It is putting together a moral act and a moral ideal, and measuring the act by the ideal. It is putting this moral act which you do alongside the eternal laws of God, and seeing how it stands by those laws of God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
This is what Jesus Christ came to do. Not to show how we can escape hell and get into heaven, but to show how we can escape from ourselves and become other selves; to show how we may cease to be what we are and become what we desire to be. He came that he might teach us and empower us to be the men we want to be, the men we ought to be.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
When I went to college we studied chemistry sitting in our seats, while the professor of chemistry revealed certain chemical truths to us, performing the operations in the laboratory for us while we looked on. We saw them, went away, — and forgot what we had learned. To-day the student of chemistry goes into the laboratory himself. The teacher does not directly reveal the truth to him, but patiently inspires him to study for himself; encourages him, guides him, directs him, shows him how to make his own investigations. Under the influence of that guidance, that direction, that counsel, that inspiration, the student works out the chemical laws for himself as though he were a new investigator. He also gets a revelation. But it is a gradual revelation, under the inspiring influence of a teacher. The modern Christian evolutionist believes that revelation has been made in this manner to the world; that God has inspired men in their quest for truth, and that under that inspiration, studying, meditating, laboring, they find their way to the truth.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
What most impressed me about Gibraltar was not Gibraltar but the snow-capped mountains opposite. Africa and mountains! Africa and snow-capped mountains! Of course I had read of the Pillars of Hercules, and knew that Gibraltar had his twin opposite. Of course I knew that all northern Africa was not sandy desert. And yet I could not believe my eyes. No! These are not clouds resting on the top of the hills; they are snow-caps on the mountains. What is it, I wonder, that always so stirs me in the view of mountains? Other landscapes I forget, or carry in my memory only as a blurred photograph. But the mountains—the Camden hills seen from Penobscot Bay, the Mount Desert range seen from the ocean, the White Mountain range seen from Fryeburg, Pike's Peak from Colorado Springs, Mont Blanc from Chamounix, the Langdale Pikes in Westmoreland—shall I ever forget them? Coming to this range of African mountains from the sea, it greets me like an apparition of an old friend in an unexpected place. While the rest of the passengers are crowding the larboard side to watch Gibraltar, I come back again and again to the view of the African mountains on the opposite side.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Impressions of a Careless Traveler
We never appreciated our dominie aright till now. But now no one can praise him too highly. The cause of this his sudden rise in public estimation is a very simple one. He has been called to a New York City parish. And he has accepted the call. This is a curious world, and the most curious part of it is the Church. While he stayed we grumbled at him. Now he leaves we grumble because he is going.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
So long as the creed is a window, and we see God through it, it is good ... but when men are content simply to believe in the creed, or in the church, or in the Bible, they are worshipping idols.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
The question has been and will be asked whether he who believes in the evolution of revelation must not believe that spiritual development will not give the Church greater prophets than Israel, and greater apostles than Paul; whether, in short, it is not time to construct a new Bible out of modern literature, which will take the place of the older Bible, composed wholly of Hebrew literature. It might, perhaps, be a sufficient reply, for one in a polemical mood, that there is no objection to the construction of such a Bible, which, when constructed, would have to take its place with the Hebrew Bible in a struggle for existence with a resultant survival of the fittest. Certainly no one who believes in the Bible as a supreme book would fear the challenge. It might be further added that most devout souls do supplement the Bible by other and more modern devotional literature. We nourish our spiritual life, not only on the lyrics of the Hebrew Psalter, but also on those of Faber and Whittier; not only on the stories of Ruth and Esther, but also on that of the Pilgrim's Progress; not only on the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, but also on the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis and the Holy Living and the Holy Dying by Jeremy Taylor. The spirit of the Bible has run far beyond the confines of that ancient literature; and wherever one finds in spoken or in written word that which clarifies faith, strengthens hope, and enriches love, he is finding a Bible message, whoever interprets it to him.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
If we trace the history of the moral and spiritual development of the race, we find first and lowest that state of mind in which sin is looked upon with allowance, indifference, unconcern. Men laugh at sin, or even honor it. Their gods are lawless and wicked. The gods of classic Greece and Rome were drunken, hateful, licentious, thieving, lying gods. What was said by Isaiah of the Israelitish nation might have been said of them: they were full of iniquity from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. The Psalmist recognizes this low conception of divinity, when in one of the Psalms he says, "You thought that God was altogether such an one as you are." There are in all our great cities men and even women who are living in this moral state, in whom sin awakens no remorse, to whom the drunkard is only an object of amusement, to whom licentiousness is matter of jest if not of admiration. There have been epochs in human history characterized by this moral state, even late in the Christian era. The literature of England in the reign of Charles the Second is full of illustrations of this death in life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
I had just arrived at this conclusion when Mr. Gear entered. A tall, thin, nervous man, with a high forehead, piercing black eyes, and a restless uneasiness that forbids him from ever being for a moment still. Now he runs his hand through his hair pushing it still further back from his dome of a head, now he drums the table with his uneasy fingers, now he crosses and uncrosses his long legs, and once, as our conversation grows animated, he rises from his seat in the vehemence of his earnestness, and leans against the mantel piece. A clear-eyed, frank faced, fine looking man, who would compel your heed if you met him anywhere, unknown, by chance, on the public street. "An infidel you may be," I say to myself, "but not a bad man; on the contrary a man with much that is true and noble, or I am no physiognomist or phrenologist either." And I rather pride myself on being both.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
"The ten commandments have been before the world for over three thousand years," said I. "The number that have learned them and accepted them as a guide, and found in them a practical help is to be counted by millions. There is hardly a child in Wheathedge that does not know something of them, and has not been made better for them; and hardly a man who knows Solon even by name. We can hardly doubt that the one is as well worth studying as the other, Mr. Gear."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The word must be spoken in season and out of season.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
What is the word of history? The historian tells us there is a progress in human development, and that history illustrates that progress, and that not only the individual man grows from babyhood to manhood, but the whole race of men grow from infantile beginnings to a future, we know not what. Is there any meaning in this? Is there any power behind it? And what does this power mean? And, again, we turn to a historian, not a theologian, — not even an orthodox historian, — to Matthew Arnold. He tells that the one thing history makes sure is that there is a power not ourselves that makes for righteousness; a power to-day at work in the world as truly and as efficaciously as ever in the past; that the evolutionary processes that are going on are making for righteousness.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
If the impure and the unjust, the drunkard and the licentious, are loathsome to us, what must be the infinite loathing of an infinitely pure Spirit for those who are worldly and selfish, licentious and cruel, ambitious and animal! But with this great loathing is a great pity. And the pity conquers the loathing, appeases it, satisfies it, is reconciled with it, only as it redeems the sinner from his loathsomeness, lifts him up from his degradation, brings him to truth and purity, to love and righteousness; for only thus is he or can he be brought to God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist