American theologian and author (1835-1922)
If you and I have not seen God, we cannot bear witness to God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
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
Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life. It is simply a history of the process of life. With the secret cause of life evolution has nothing to do. A man, therefore, may be a materialistic evolutionist or a theistic evolutionist; that is, he may believe that the cause is some single unintelligent impersonal force, or he may believe that the cause is a wise and beneficent God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
I now conceive of God as in his universe. I conceive of creation as a growth. I conceive of him as making the universe somewhat as our spirit makes our body, shaping and changing and developing it by processes from within. The figures from the finite to the infinite are imperfect and misleading, but this is the figure which best represents to me my own thought of God's relation to the universe: Not that of an engineer who said one morning, " Go to, I will make a world," and in six days, or six thousand years, or six million thousand years, made one by forming it from without, as a potter forms the clay with skilful hand; but that of a Spirit who has been forever manifesting himself in the works of creation and beneficence in all the universe, one little work of whose wisdom and beneficence we are and we see.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
The object of the American college in 1850 was to prepare the student for one of the three learned professions — law, medicine, or the ministry. I do not think that any one of the members of my class looked forward to another than one of these three careers. Engineering was not regarded as a learned profession, nor journalism, nor literature, nor music, nor art, nor acting, nor agriculture, nor teaching, nor business. For business what was needed was not education, but experience. Teaching was not a profession. Very few chose it as their life work. College professors frequently, college presidents almost uniformly, were clergymen who from choice or necessity had left the pulpit for the college chair; other teachers had generally taken up the work for bread-andbutter reasons or en route to something else. The farmer looked upon "book larnin'" with good-humored contempt, not without some justification, since the agricultural books and papers of that day were largely the work of academicians without practical experience.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
God is our native air. The godless soul gasps out a feeble life in a vacuum. "I will not leave you orphans," saith Christ; "I will come to you." Yet, despite this promise, how many orphaned Christians there are. They are not exactly fatherless. They have a memory of a father in the dim past. They have a hope of a Father in the far future. But now they live without him. They are like travelers in a long and gloomy tunnel. They look back to the days of the patriarchs and prophets. There is light there. They look forward to the revelations of the future life. There is light there. But here and now it is dark.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
"I don't believe in no kind of fiction, nohow," said Mr. Hardcap, emphatically. "What we want is facts, Mr. Laicus-hard facts. That's what I was brought up on when I was a boy, and that's what I mean to bring my boys up on."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
It is only by human experiences that we can interpret the Divine.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
There are three ways of seeing the Riviera— from the sea, from the carriage road, from the train. We have had a little of all three, enough to make comparison possible; and the view from the sea is incomparably the best. The railroad runs along the coast, under the cliffs and often in tunnels through them; one looks from the Riviera upon the sea, but gets only just enough glimpses up the ravines of the beauty of the coast to be tantalizing. The carriage road runs far up on the cliffs, sometimes on the top of the hills. One looks down on the scene of the beauty, with the sea far below; but the distant snow-capped mountains are hid by the intervening hills on the one side, and the precipitous cliffs and terraced hillsides are too much beneath to be adequately seen upon the other. Perhaps it was because my friends had been on the Riviera looking off, and I had been on the deck of a steamer looking on, that their account gave me no conception of yesterday's stately procession of beauty. I do not expect ever to see another such picture gallery.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Impressions of a Careless Traveler
We celebrate on Christmas, not the birth of Santa Claus, the patron saint of the children; not merely the birth of the Christ-child, symbol of all innocent childhood; nor yet alone the birth of the martyr-hero, leader and type of all who have lived and loved and suffered for their race. We celebrate a new unveiling of God to humanity, the dwelling of God in humanity. We celebrate the day when the love of God dawned on the world and the fear of the gods began slowly and sullenly to give way before the coming of the new day. Every year Christmas repeats its message: Fear God no more. He brings liberty to the enslaved, light to the despairing, purer joy to the glad. He is the Comforter of the sorrowing, the Physician of the sick, the Healer of the sinful, the Friend and Companion of man.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
A man is no less a person because he can speak in New York and be heard in Chicago, or press a button in Washington and set machinery in motion in Omaha. Extension of power does not lessen the personality of him who exercises it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
I have a repugnance to be known and understood by everybody. I do not like to have my feelings or my thoughts every one's property.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
What has made the Church of Christ what it is to-day? Our struggles? Did we face the persecutions of Nero? Did we flee from the persecuting hordes in the Waldensian valleys? Did we fight the battles with the Duke of Alva on the plains of Netherlands? Did we struggle with hierarchical despotism at Worcester and at Naseby? Did we face the cold and the suffering of New England? Others have struggled for us, and we have taken the fruit of their struggles; and if our posterity are to have a nation worthy of their possession, it will be because in us there is also some hand-to-hand wrestling, some self-denial, some struggle with the forces of corruption and evil in our own time. This is the great general law which Paul has expressed in the declaration, "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now." Vicarious sacrifice is not an episode. It is the universal law of life. Life comes only from life. This is the first proposition. Life-giving costs the life-giver something. That is the second proposition. Pain is travail-pain, birth-pain; and it is a part of the divine order -- that is, of the order of nature -- that the birth of a higher life should always be through the pain of another.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
God is always manifesting Himself, and He is manifesting Himself by successive manifestations: first in nature; then in the prophets; then in an inspired race; last of all, in one man whom He fills full of Himself.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
He who thus regards the Bible is not in the least troubled by finding errors in it; he expects to find such errors. They do not in the least militate against the value of the Book. It is quite immaterial to him that the world was not made in six days; that there never was a universal deluge; that Abraham mistook the voice of conscience calling on him to consecrate his only son to God, and interpreted it as a command to slay his son as a burnt offering; that Israel misinterpreted righteous indignation at the cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion for a divine summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death; that a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not and did not discriminate between formal regulations respecting camp life and eternal principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to regard them as of equal authority; that a people half emancipated from the paganism which imagines that God must be placated by sacrifice before He can forgive sins gave to the sacrificial system that Israel had borrowed from paganism the same divine authority which they gave to those revolutionary elements in the system that were destined eventually to sweep it entirely out of existence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
It is said of Jesus that He grew in wisdom and in stature. He did not know everything in the beginning. His wisdom was a growth. This is the universal law of the individual, who always grows in his knowledge of what we call religious truth, no less than in his knowledge of what we call secular truth. He is no more born with an accurate knowledge of God, truth, purity, righteousness, than with an accurate knowledge of geology, geography, astronomy, history, or language. The simplest intellectual declarations respecting God are unmeaning to a little child, — as, God is a Person. The simplest spiritual declarations respecting God mean but little — as, God is love. To the child in the infant class this does not and cannot mean what it means to the grandmother, who has passed through all the phases of love, and learned in the school of experience all the meaning of love. Does one ask, What does Christ mean by saying that we must become as little children if we would enter the kingdom of heaven? He means that, however much we know, we must be eager to learn more. Does any one ask, What does He mean by the saying, Of such is the kingdom of heaven? He means, out of such eagerness to learn more, the kingdom of heaven is developed in the soul. We all practically recognize the truth that the child must grow into the knowledge of God, truth, duty.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
A bad God is worse than no God at all.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
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
I believe that God is the Great Companion, that we are not left orphans, that we may have comradeship with him.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion