American theologian and author (1835-1922)
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
Let us get rid of this notion that we must always associate the thoughts of God with a spirit of great solemnity. Gayety and God are not mutually exclusive.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
The word must be spoken in season and out of season.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Was it not at Bunker Hill that the soldiers were directed to reserve their fire till the attacking party had exhausted theirs? That is the way Jennie conducts an argument—when she argues at all, which is very seldom. She accepted every consideration I had offered against uniting with the Wheathedge church, and yet I knew her opinion was not changed; and somehow my own began to waver. I wonder how that method of arguing would work in the court-room. I mean to try it some time.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
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
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
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
God's child shares his Father's immortality.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
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
Even then, if one looked on man and saw how his aspirations and desires reached out into eternity, how he projected himself into eternity, how he set forces to work that were reaching forward into the far future, — even then it were difficult to see why it should be thought that "death ends all." But when one believes that the whole creation is focused on man, — that the whole process of the planetary system, beginning so far back that not memory nor even imagination can conceive it, issues in man; when one believes that the whole process of the long evolution, purposed in the divine love, thought out in the divine mind, and wrought out by divine energy, has been accomplished for the purpose of producing a thinking, willing, loving man, how is it possible for him to believe that the end of it all is — nothing?
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
That is the best sermon, not which is a great pulpit effort, but which is helpful. If, young men, you have preached a sermon and some one comes up to you and says that was a great pulpit effort, hide your head in shame and go home and never write another like it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
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
"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
Courage is caution overcome.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
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
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
My faith in miracles rests also on my faith in Christ -- he himself a greater miracle by far than any attributed to him.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
My wife is a diplomate. If ever I am president of the United States—which may Heaven forbid,—she shall be secretary of State. She never argues; but she always carries her point.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish