American theologian and author (1835-1922)
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
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
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 a poor sort of fatalism which makes men fold their hands and wait for fortune.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
I have feelings, but my pen cannot and will not write feelings; nay, my heart has no mind that can coin them into words.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
What we laymen want at the communion service, from our pastors, is chiefly silence. Only a few and simple words; the fewer and simpler the better. Oh! you who are privileged to distribute to us the emblems of Christ's love, believe me that the communion never reaches its highest end, save when you interpret it to us, not merely as a flower-strewn grave of a dead past, but as a Mount of Transfiguration whereon we talk with a living, an ascended Saviour. Believe me too, we want at that table no other message than that which a voice from on high whispers in our hearts: "This is my beloved Son, hear ye him!"
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The truth is always the same ... and the wants of the human heart are not widely different.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The street-walkers were much more in evidence then than they are to-day; or is it only that they were more in evidence to a youth under seventeen than they are to a man over seventy? I do not think that is all. That I should not be accosted now as I often was then is natural enough; but I have eyes to see and some common sense to judge whether the women I see upon the broad and well-lighted streets between eleven and twelve o'clock are professionals or not. The upper gallery in most, if not all, of the theaters was reserved for such women, where they might ply their trade, and no woman was allowed on the floor or in the first gallery of most theaters unless accompanied by a man as a guarantee of her respectability.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
It is hardly necessary to point out the function or dwell upon the necessity of conscience in human life. It is fundamental to all that is human in life. Without it men would be brutes; society would be wholly predatory; the only law recognized would be the law of the strongest; the only restraint on cupidity would be self-interest. There could be neither justice nor freedom. Trade would be a perpetual attempt at the spoliation of one's neighbor. Law could be enforced only by fear, and government would be of necessity a despotism. The higher faculties uninfluenced by conscience would rapidly degenerate. Reverence would no longer be paid to the good and the true, but only to the strong and the terrible; religion would become a superstition; God a demon ruling by fear, not by law; punishment a torment inflicted by hate and wrath, not a penalty sanctioned by conscience for disregard of its just and necessary laws; and benevolence itself, unregulated by a sense of right and wrong, would become a mere sentiment, following with its tears the robber as readily as the Messiah to his crucifixion, and strewing its flowers as lavishly on the grave of the felon as on that of the martyr. In history have been seen all these exhibitions, not of the absolute elimination of conscience from human life, for conscience has never been wholly wanting in the most degraded epoch of the most degraded nation, but of its obscuration and its effeminacy.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
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
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
The logical outcome of the Pro-Slavery party was the Southern Confederacy; the logical outcome of the Anti-Slavery party was the Republican party; the logical outcome of the conflict between the two was the Civil War.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
The light that shines from the Old Testament is that of the Star of Bethlehem, which conducts the reader to the manger of his Incarnate Lord. That star I seek to follow.
LYMAN ABBOTT
preface, Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
It is true that even to the heathen death did not end all. They believed in something after death, but they knew not what--a vague, shadowy, unsatisfactory immortality.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Other Room
Men who do want God, who are really in earnest to find God, who do not live in the outward world altogether, but have some vision of the inner, who do not stop at the creed or the church or the Book, who do not call God to an account for the way in which he conducts himself, still fail to find God because they want God only for what God will bring to them.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Life proceeds from life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
It is only by human experiences that we can interpret the Divine.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
God is always revealing himself, and has always been revealing himself. He has always been knocking at the door; he has always been standing at the window. He has always been showing his character. They who have seen it best and most clearly, and had power to tell us what they have seen, are the world's prophets. What is distinctive in respect to Hebrew law is not its universal applicability to the human race — there is a great deal in the Hebrew law to which we no longer pay any attention; it is the recognition of the fact that God is the great lawgiver. What is peculiar in the Hebrew history is not its narration of great battles, great statesmen's endeavors and achievements; it is the history of the dealing of God with a particular people. God is as truly with the American race as he ever was with the Hebrew race; as truly with Abraham Lincoln as he was with Moses. The difference between the Hebrew race and the American race is the difference between the Old Testament Scriptures and the modern newspaper. The modern newspaper is enterprising, and it gathers news, and gathers gossip that is not news, from the four quarters of the globe; but it fails to see God in human history. The Old Testament prophets did not show the same enterprise, did not have the same wideness of view; but they did see God in human history, and have helped us to see him. That vision of God is equally characteristic of the fiction of the Bible — Ruth, Esther, Jonah, the parable of the prodigal son (there are some people who think it is irreverent to suggest that there is any fiction in the Old Testament, but quite right to find it in the words of Christ in the New), and of the drama of the Bible — the epic drama of Job, the love drama of the Song of Songs. In these is seen a manifestation, a revelation of goodness and truth and righteousness, and, above all, of a personal God dealing with men. This is the characteristic of the Hebrew poetry. We find more beautiful phrasing in Wordsworth, or in Tennyson, or in Longfellow, or in Whittier, but nowhere do you find in literature, ancient or modern, such discoveries of God as in the Hebrew Psalter. The "Eternal Goodness" may seem to you more beautiful than the One Hundred and Third Psalm; but would Whittier have written " Eternal Goodness" if he had not read the One Hundred and Third Psalm?
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
Let us look at this man a little more closely. He begins in a single cell, and passes through the successive stages of different animals. He is successively reptile, bird, fish, vertebrate mammal, and at last becomes man. I do not speak of the race, but of the individual; he comes into what we call life through these successive stages of previous lives. He is born, dwelling in a body; and we do not need the scientist to tell us his subsequent history. That process we easily trace in three successive stages. First, this body is the necessary means for his development. He is developed by the body. He learns through the eye and the ear, the hand and the foot, the activities of the physical organization. Is he blind, one element of his development is cut off; is he deaf, another element; is he deprived of the sense of touch, a third element. With these all gone some development may be carried on, but, speaking generally, it may be said that the body is necessary to his development. By the very discipline he receives through his body his soul is moulded and shaped. He is educated through the physical organization. Then he comes into the second stage, in which this body becomes the necessary instrument of his activity. It is the power by which he operates on the world without. His lungs, his heart, his stomach, keep the machine in order, while the machine is being used to impart to other lives. Because he has hands which are themselves tools, he makes tools, as no handless animal can. Because he has eyes, he can produce color, which otherwise he could not produce. With his tongue he speaks, and communicates his thoughts to others. With his pen he writes, and communicates his life to other lives. His body is the necessary instrument of his activity, — this is the second stage. Finally, in old age, he comes into the third stage, in which the body becomes a hindrance to his development. He still has the same power to perceive truth that he always had, but he has become deaf and cannot hear. He has the same artistic sense that he always had, but he has become blind and cannot see. He has the same burning thoughts with which he was wont to inspire audiences, but his voice has lost its music and its power; he cannot reach the audience. He is still a musician, and the music is in his soul, but the voice is gone; we want to hear him sing no more. His very brain ceases to formulate thought. His soul has outgrown the body. First it was the instrument for development; second, an instrument for usefulness; now it is neither. He has not grown old, but the organ that he used has grown old. Gladstone is not old. Put him in a new body, — what a magnificent statesman he would be! Henry Ward Beecher was not old. Bring him back and put him in a body forty years old, — how his eloquence would again stir the heart of the nation! Men do not grow old; it is the body which grows old, unable to fulfill its function as the servant of the spirit.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist