American theologian and author (1835-1922)
I firmly believe that the method which sets theological theories against scientifically ascertained facts, is fatal to the current theology and injurious to the spirit of religion; and that the method which frankly recognizes the facts of life, and appreciates the spirit of the scientists whose patient and assiduous endeavor has brought those facts to light, will commend the spirit of religion to the new generation, and will benefit--not impair--theology as a science, by compelling its reconstruction.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
God's child shares his Father's immortality.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
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
Courage is caution overcome.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
As I write there lies before me a letter from my late pastor. He wants to borrow $300 for a few weeks. His Board of Trustees are thus much behind-hand in the first quarter's payment. He has not the means to pay his rent. The duty of the Board in such a case is very evident. The very least they can do is to share in providing temporarily for the exigency. The very most which a mean Board could do would be to ask the minister to unite with them in paying up the deficiency. In fact, he who is least able to do it has to carry it all. Nobody else will trust the church. He has to trust it for hundreds of dollars. And then when his grocer and his landlord and his tailor go unpaid, men shrug their shoulders and say, pityingly, "Oh! he's a minister, he is not trained to business habits." And the world looks on in wonder and in silent contempt to see the Christian Church carrying on its business in a manner the flagrant dishonesty of which would close the doors of any bank, deprive any insurance company of its charter, and drive any broker in Wall street from the Brokers' Board.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Among the various types of woman's character which the Bible affords us—and nearly every type of womanly excellence is to be found within its pages, the singer, the preacher, the warrior, the ruler, and, highest and most excellent of all, the faithful wife and mother—two possess peculiar pre-eminence, because they have christened with their names the books which narrate the story of their lives. One of these books—an idyl, a poem in prose—is the story of a peasant-girl who became mother of kings. It is full of a quiet, rural charm which has invested the very name of Ruth with a peculiar tenderness. The other carries us among courts and court intrigues, in times of direst peril, and narrates plots and counter-plots as marvelous and exciting as imagination ever conceived. It is the story of a nation saved by the brave fidelity of a single faithful woman, who, by her queenly courage, has made the name of Esther truly regal through all time.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
What is God's way of doing things, according to evolution? It is to develop life by successive processes, until a spirit akin to His appears in a bodily organism akin to that of the lower animals from which it has been previously evolved. This bodily organism is from birth in a state of constant decay and repair. At length the time comes when, through disease or old age, the repair no longer keeps pace with the decay. Then the body returns to the earth, and the spirit to God who gave it. This disembodying of the spirit we call death. There is at death an end of the body. It knows no resurrection save in grass and flowers. The resurrection, the anastasis or up-standing as the New Testament calls it, is the resurrection of the spirit. The phrase "resurrection of the body" never occurs in the New Testament. But every death is a resurrection of the spirit. What we call death the New Testament calls an "exodus" or an emancipation from bondage, an "unmooring " or setting the ship free from its imprisonment.1 The spirit is released from its confinement, and this release is death. Death is, in short, not a cessation of existence, not a break in existence; it is simply what Socrates declared it to be, "the separation of the soul and body. And being dead is the attainment of this separation; when the soul exists in herself, and is parted from the body, and the body is parted from the soul, — that is death."
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
This subordination of time and place to comfort and convenience is a part of her quite unconscious and therefore unformulated theory that life is the end and that all household arrangements are means to that end. She therefore believes that things are for folks, not folks for things, and always and instinctively acts on that belief.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
There are some metaphysical and abstract arguments for the opinion that the mind, the I within, that controls the body, what the Germans call the ego—which is Latin for I—is simple, not complex; that is, one power operating in different ways and doing different things. I am myself inclined to think that the better opinion; but it is not necessary here to go into this question at all, for what we are going to study is not the mind itself, but human nature, that is, the operations of the mind. And there is no doubt that the operations of the mind are complex. There may be, I am inclined to think there is, but one power, which perceives and thinks and feels and wills; but perceiving and thinking and feeling and willing are very different actions, and it is only with the actions that we have to do.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
The most beautiful statue that Powers ever chiseled does not compare for grace and beauty with the Divine model. The same mystic element of life is wanting.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
So the end draws daily nearer, and no one guesses it except herself. Her life is not ebbing away, it is at its flood. She has trained herself in the habit of immortality, the habit of looking, not at the things which are seen and are transitory, but at the things which are not seen and are eternal. Her anticipatory ambitions for her children and her grandchildren are boundless, and the hopes for herself which made radiant the dawn of her life seem dim beside the higher hopes for her loved ones which fill life's eventide with sunshine. Her husband and herself are lovers still; the honeymoon has never set, never even waned; and to his love is added that of those whom God has given to her. She thinks to live naturally is the best preparation for dying peacefully; rarely, therefore, does she allow herself to forecast the coming day. When she does, not with dread but with a solemn gladness she looks forward to emancipation from the irksome bonds of the fettering body and to embarkation for that unknown continent where many colonists are already gathered to give her greeting. Faith, hope, love — these are life. And her faith was never so clear, for her heart was never so pure; her hopes were never so great, for experience has enlarged them; and her love was never so rich, for God, who is love, has been her life Companion.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Nor has the day of God's counsel and guidance passed away. It is true the world has emerged from its childhood. It walks no longer in leading-strings. Humanity is thrown more, so to speak, on its own resources. But it is not orphaned. The oracles are not silent. Urim and Thummim are not departed from the temple; only now every heart is a temple to God. In every soul the oracle of God witnesseth. God did not cease to guide Israel when Moses died. Dreams, visions, heavenly voices, angel visitations have ceased. But God is not therefore silent. Eliezer neither heard an audible voice, nor saw a celestial vision. He expected no miracle. But God guided him no less than Moses, or Joshua, or Gideon. He who desires only to do God's will need never be long at a loss to know it. Events are his ministers, our teachers. Only for the most part we are like Balaam, bent on our plans, determined he shall guide us where we want to go. If we blunder, it is generally because, whatever we say with our lips, in our hearts we reverse Christ's prayer. Our real petition is, "Not as thou wilt, but as I will."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
It is late in the fall. The summer birds have fled southward. The summer residents have fled to their city homes. The mountains have blossomed out in all the brilliance of their autumnal colors; but the transitory glory has gone and they are brown and bare. One little flurry of snow has given us warning of what is coming. The furnace has been put in order; the double windows have been put on; a storm-house has enclosed our porch; a great pile of wood lies up against the stable, giving my boy promise of plenty of exercise during the long winter. And still the summer lingers in these bright and glorious autumnal days. And of them the carpenters and the painters are making much in their work on the new library-hall.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
It has been made the subject of some comment lately that Deacon Goodsole habitually absents himself from our Sabbath evening service. The pastor called the other day to confer with me on the subject; for he has somehow come to regard me as a convenient adviser, perhaps because I hold no office and take no very active part in the management of the Church, and so am quite free from what may be called its politics. He said he thought it quite unfortunate; not that the Deacon needed the second service himself, but that, by absenting himself from the house of God, he set a very bad example to the young people of the flock. "We cannot expect," said he, somewhat mournfully, "that the young people will come to Church, when the elders themselves stay away." At the same time he said he felt some delicacy about talking with the Deacon himself on the subject. "Of course," said he, "if he does not derive profit from my discourses I do not want to dragoon him into hearing them."
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
I do not believe that the laws of nature have ever been violated, for this would be to believe that God who dwells in nature and animates it has violated the laws of his own being.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
Devout seekers after God are not infrequently separated from him by sorrow. It is said that sorrow brings one to God. So it sometimes does. But it sometimes estranges from God. Great sorrow often makes it seem for the time as though life were unjust, and there were no God ruling in the universe. This is a very common experience. It was the experience of Job in his distress, of the Psalmist in his exile, of Paul in his struggle with life and death, and principalities and powers, and things present and things to come. It was in the experience of the Master himself when he cried, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If when we look out upon life and see its travail of pain, or when the anguish of life enters our own soul and embitters it, the sun sometimes seems blotted out of the heavens, and God seems gone, we are not to chide ourselves; we are to remember that our experience of temporary oblivion of the Almighty is an experience which the devout in all ages have known. Wait thou his time. Blessed is he who in such an hour of sorrow, when it seems as though God were departing, still holds to him, and cries, "My God! my God!"
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
When a man begins to justify the ways of God to man, he has entered on a very dangerous process.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Warm hearts are better than great thoughts.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish