American theologian and author (1835-1922)
The years pass in review before me. Thank God for the dear wife who three years ago persuaded me that I was a Christian more than a Congregationalist. The years have not been unfruitful. The work has been, oh! so little, and the harvest so great!
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
For the orthodox, who thought it wrong to go to the theater, there were Barnum's Museum and Christy's Minstrels and Perham's Panorama. Barnum's Museum was situated at the corner of Ann Street and Broadway, opposite the old Astor House, which they are beginning to demolish as I am writing these lines. A band of half a dozen players upon brass instruments occupied a balcony and competed more or less successfully with the noise of the street. Within were all manner of curiosities, real and fictitious, and a little theater where went on some sort of a performance twice a day. It was labeled "Lecture Room," and the legend was current in college that a very orthodox and also a very simpleminded member of my brother's class, after inspecting the curiosities, went into this lecture room, expecting a prayer-meeting, and fled in horror from the spot when the curtain rose and disclosed some dancers or male and female acrobats, I forget which. There was for a little while a passion for panoramas, a kind of moving picture show quite unlike the modern "movies." John Banvard carried this form of exhibition to its climax in his panorama of the Mississippi, which he had painted himself traveling the Mississippi in a skiff for that purpose. The panorama is said to have been three miles long. We sat in our seats as the picture was unrolled before us for an hour and a half or more, and easily imagined ourselves on the deck of a Mississippi steamer watching the shore as we sailed down the river. Christy's Minstrels was a favorite recreation of my father's. I am inclined to think their jokes and conundrums were rather a bore to him; but they had good voices, and their music, though not of the highest kind, was, of its kind, the best. There was no Philharmonic or Symphony Society in those days, though I think the Oratorio Society existed, and there must have been an orchestra to accompany it. But Barnum, who was a great benefactor to his country as well as a great showman, brought Jenny Lind to America, and so set the fashion of importing famous singers to America, which later led on to the Metropolitan Opera.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
A pretty little cottage-white, with green blinds; the neatest of neat fences; a little platform in front of the sidewalk with three steps leading up to it,—a convenient method of access to our high country carriages; two posts before the gate neatly turned, a trellis over the front door with a climbing rose which has mounted half way to the top and stopped to rest for the season; another trellis fan-shaped behind which a path disappears that leads round to the kitchen door; the tastiest of little bird houses, now tenantless and desolate,—this is the picture that meets my eye and assures me that Mr. Gear is a man both of taste and thrift, as indeed he is.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
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
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
It is not youth we want at Wheathedge, but spiritual life and earnestness. At least it is to be thought of. But as to salary-how we are to get a first class man at a third class salary puzzles me. I shall have to refer that to Mr. Wheaton. He is the financier of our church I believe.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
"God is love," says the apostle. We might almost transpose the apothegm, and say "Love is God." That is, it is love which renders him worthy of our worship. It is not the power which made the worlds and allotted them their courses; it is not the wisdom which orders all of life, and suffers not even the minutest detail to escape his notice; it is not even those aesthetic qualities, which have produced in divinely-created forms of beauty the types of all art and all architecture, that render God worthy " to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing." It is that his love is such that nothing seems to him too sacred to be sacrificed to the welfare of others.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
To say that the Great Companion is dead, is not to say that there is no God. The dead also live; but between them and ourselves all communion and companionship seem to most of us impossible. So to many in our own time, to many without the Church, to some within it, living companionship with a living God is an experience unknown. They believe in what Carlyle calls a "hypothetical God," but he is to them only a hypothesis. They look back through the ages for some evidence of a God who revealed himself centuries ago; they look forward with anticipation to a God who will reveal himself in some future ephiphany; but of a God here and now, a God who is a perpetual presence, a God whom they can see as Abraham saw him, with whom they can talk as Moses talked with him, who will inspire them with courage as he inspired Gideon, with hope as he inspired Isaiah, and with praise as he inspired David, they do not know.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion
What is a Christian? Not a man who is perfectly conformed to the image of Christ, who does all that Christ would have him do, and never does anything that Christ would not have him do (certainly that man would be a Christian if he could be found--but if only that kind of man were a Christian, there are none). A Christian is one who is following after Christ; who is conforming himself to Christ; who is still doing the things he would not do and leaving undone the things he would do; who still has to battle within himself against appetite and pride and corruption, and yet who is making a brave battle.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
How few of us appreciate the fact that a very great deal of physical suffering in after life comes from bad mental training in childhood! I do not mean suffering of an imaginary kind; I mean disease which may entirely ruin a life which might have been of use to the world, and which surely would have been happier but for the lost health. Many a chronic invalid might have preserved his health had he been taught to use his brain properly when a child.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The House and Home: A Practical Book
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
Our Bible class at the Mill has prospered greatly. Mr. Gear was better than his word. The first Sabbath he brought in over a dozen of his young men; the half dozen who were already in the Sabbath School joined us of course. Others have followed. Some of the children of the Mill village gathered curiously about the school-house door from Sunday to Sunday. It occurred to me that we might do something with them. I proposed it to Mr. Gear. He assented. So we invited them in, got a few discarded singing books from the Wheathedge Sabbath-school, and used music as an invitation to more. Mrs. Gear has come in to teach them. There are not over a dozen or twenty all told as yet. If the skating or the sliding is good they are reduced to five or six. Still the number is gradually increasing, and there are enough to constitute the germ of a possible Mission-school. I wish we had a Pastor. He might make something out of it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Why, in a world made and ruled by a beneficent being, should there be suffering, — not accidental, incidental, occasional, but wrought into the very woof of life? The first sound of the babe is a cry; the last sound of the dying man is, ordinarily, a sigh or groan; and from the cradle to the grave the sad refrain of sorrow sounds. Neither the merry music of pleasure, the clatter of industry, nor the noise of battle can effectually drown it. We can understand some aspects of this mystery. Why sin should bring with it penalty we can understand; why imperfection should require suffering as a discipline for its removal we can understand. But the innocent suffer more than the guilty: the mother more than the wayward son; the hero on the battlefield laying down his life for the nation, or suffering racking pain in the hospital, more than the ambitious politician who provoked the war; the martyr offering his life for the Church more than the bigot who fires the fagots. How is this? Why should innocence suffer as well as guilt — often more?
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
But one truth must ever grow clearer — the truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence everywhere manifested, to which we can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain this one absolute certainty, that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
Before Christ brought life and immortality to light, death was the slayer of man's hopes. It left love alive, but love without hope is poignant sorrow.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Other Room
Of course, we must trim the Sunday school-room as well as the Church, for the children must have their Christmas; and trimmed it was, so luxuriantly that it seemed as though the woods had laid siege to and taken possession of the sanctuary, and that nature was preparing to join on this glad day her voice with that of man in singing praise to Him who brings life to a winter-wrapped earth, and whose fittest symbol, therefore, is the tree whose greenness not even the frosts of the coldest winter have power to diminish.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Nothing is trivial to God which is of consequence to us. He is not so absorbed with the affairs of state that he can give no time or thought to the minor concerns of his children's life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
I cannot recall that even the supposedly awful temptations of a city life were temptations to us. Our companions were clean companions, our recreations were clean recreations, the plays we went to were clean plays.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
It is true that the argument for a Creator from the creation is by modern science modified only to be strengthened. The doctrine of a great First Cause gives place to the doctrine of an Eternal and Perpetual Cause; the carpenter conception of creation to the doctrine of the divine immanence. The Roman notion of a human Jupiter, renamed Jehovah, made to dwell in some bright particular star, and holding telephonic communication with the spheres by means of invisible wires which sometimes fail to work, dies, and the old Hebrew conception of a divinity which inhabiteth eternity, and yet dwells in the heart of the contrite and the humble, takes its place.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends