American theologian and author (1835-1922)
It is a shame for a man to be a millionaire in possessions if he is not also a millionaire in beneficence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
But there is, nevertheless, an invisible world, which they only see whose eyes the Lord has opened. Science tells us a great deal; but there is a sphere which it is absolutely incompetent to enter; about which, question it as you may, it is absolutely dumb. It can analyze the flower, and tell you all its parts, and describe its wonderful mechanisms and their yet more wonderful operations; but it has neither the eye to discern nor the heart to feel the subtle influence of its divine beauty. It dissects with its keen scalpel the human frame, and tells you the nature and function of every part—what the heart supplies, what the nerves do, how the muscles act. But there is no anatomy possible of the soul; no microscope discloses the nature and the office of reason, imagination, love. The inner life hides itself from the baffled scientist. It needs the prophetic eye to discern the true man within. There are truths which can not be deduced; which are not wrought out with much thought and from much observation; which are incapable of logical demonstration. They are to be known, to be instantly apprehended by the soul upon the mere presentation of them. The musician can not prove that the harmonies of Mendelssohn or Beethoven are grand to one whose soul is not thrilled by them. The practical mill-man, who saw in Niagara nothing but a great waterpower, was simply incapable of appreciating that "grandeur of the Creator's power" which led Audubon to bow before it trembling in silent adoration. Love can not be proved to a mother. The babe on her breast is the only demonstration. Disbelief in love is the evidence of an indurated heart. The man who misanthropically scouts at affection, only witnesses, by his skepticism, his own moral degradation.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
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
All forms of modern skepticism have a common philosophical foundation. Their philosophy denies that we can know any thing except that which we learn through the senses directly, or through conclusions deduced from the senses. We know that there is a sun because we see it; we know approximately its weight and its distance from the earth, because by long processes of reasoning we reach conclusions on those subjects from phenomena which we do see. What we do not thus see, or hear, or touch, or taste, or smell, or thus conclude from what we have seen, or heard, or touched, or tasted, or smelled, is said to belong to the unknown and unknowable. This is the basis of modern skepticism. It is the basis, too, of much of modern theology. It is the secret of the " scientific method." By this method we conclude the existence of an invisible God from the phenomena of life exactly as we conclude the existence of an invisible ether from the phenomena of light. But the God thus deduced is like the ether, only an hypothesis. It is quite legitimate to offer a new hypothesis; and the scientist will be as ready to accept one hypothesis as another, provided it accounts for the phenomena. This philosophy, pursued to its legitimate and logical conclusion, issues in the denial that man is a religious being; or possesses a spiritual nature; or is any thing more than a highly organized and developed animal.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
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 power that is to redeem him must be a power working within, not without.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Some stories in Scripture, such as the story of Jonah, I think are fiction, never intended by the writer to be taken as history; some, such as the story of the floating axe head and the coin found in a fish's mouth, I regard as folklore, incorporated by an undiscriminating editor in the historical record. Nor do I think it necessary to decide just what measure of accuracy characterizes each separate incident. For my faith in Christ rests, not on the miracles, but on Christ himself. Even as he wrought them he declared them to be but inferior evidences of his divinity.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
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
It is not possible even to state the doctrine of an atheistic creation without using the language of theism in the statement.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
I have said that I do not remember ever going into a bar-room or saloon; to that statement I must make one exception. I wanted to know the city from the top to the bottom, its vices as well as its virtues. This desire was partly natural, partly morbid. Defensible or indefensible, it existed. Combining with two or three of my college mates, we hired a policeman to take us through New York. He did the job apparently with thoroughness. He took us into the parlors of one or two houses in Mercer Street, which was then a prostitutes' thoroughfare; then through the Five Points, where no man dared to go by night alone, and even by day went at some hazard; and then to the scene of the worst haunts of the sailors in Water Street. I would not recommend this method of moral vaccination in general, but it was effectual in my case. There has never since that visit been for me any glamour in vice. I had seen it as a critical spectator in all its deformity, and good taste would have kept me from it even if moral principle did not. We did not visit any gambling-house. The interior of a gambling-hell I never saw until many years after, when, with my wife and some other friends, I visited Monte Carlo, where I saw the most unromantic and stupid exhibition of purely sordid avarice my eyes ever beheld.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
I did not think it necessary to frighten my cousin by telling her why I came away. When a bullet whizzed by me and flattened itself against the brick wall over my head, I thought it was time for me to retreat, which I did with celerity. This is the nearest I have ever been to a battle, and I have never desired to be any nearer. My military ambition is not ardent.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
I am accustomed to judge of men by their companions, and books are companions. So whenever I am in a parlor alone I always examine the book-case, or the centre table—if there is one. In Mrs. Wheaton's parlor I find no book-case, but a large centre table on which there are several annuals with a great deal of gilt binding and very little reading, and a volume or two of plates, sometimes handsome, more often showy. In the library, which opens out of the parlor, I find sets of the classic authors in library bindings, but when I take one down it betrays the fact that no other hand has touched it to open it before. And I know that Jim Wheaton buys books to furnish his house, just as he buys wall paper and carpets. At Mr. Hardcap's I find a big family Bible, and half a dozen of those made up volumes fat with thick paper and large type, and showy with poor pictures, which constitute the common literature of two thirds of our country homes. And I know that poor Mr. Hardcap is the unfortunate victim of book agents. At Deacon Goodsole's I always see some school books lying in admirable confusion on the sitting-room table. And I know that Deacon Goodsole has children, and that they bring their books home at night to do some real studying, and that they do it in the family sitting-room and get help now and then from father and from mother. And so while I am waiting for Mr. Gear I take a furtive glance at his well filled shelves. I am rather surprized to find in his little library so large a religious element, though nearly all of it heterodox. There is a complete edition of Theodore Parker's works, Channing's works, a volume or two of Robertson, one of Furness, the English translation of Strauss' Life of Christ, Renan's Jesus, and half a dozen more similar books, intermingled with volumes of history, biography, science, travels, and the New American Cyclopedia. The Radical and the Atlantic Monthly are on the table. The only orthodox book is Beecher's Sermons,—and I believe Dr. Argure says they are not orthodox; the only approach to fiction is one of Oliver Wendell Holmes' books, I do not now remember which one. "Well," said I to myself, "whatever this man is, he is not irreligious."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Christ is the manifestation of God, not of certain attributes of God or certain phases of his administration. There is no justice to be feared in God that was not manifested in Christ; there is no mercy to attract in Christ that is not eternally in God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
Which is worthier, the music or the libretto? It is hard to say. But this is certain, that perfect music often redeems a prosaic libretto.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
We think if we can only take the temptation away from men, men will be virtuous. We are mistaken. Men are made virtuous by confronting temptation.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
We made our own fish-lines, twisting and double-twisting and triple-twisting the silk, ganged on the hooks, bought the long bamboo poles and cut them up, and out of them made our own jointed fishing-rods. We always cleaned our fish ourselves. It was the law of the sport that our fun should not make work for others which we ourselves could do.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
The combination of old and new makes Genoa a city of curious contrasts. Driving through the city, we passed along broad avenues cut through old portions of the city, the hills cut down—for Genoa is built on hills—the valleys filled up, old houses being demolished, new houses going up. We drove in five minutes from new Genoa to old Genoa, and were in streets so narrow that the residents of the upper stories might almost shake hands across the street, and easily can, and I suspect do, carry on gossip with one another; streets bounded by tenements six, eight, or even ten stories in height, the walls ornamented with ancient frescoes, peeping at us from between the articles of the week's wash hung in graceful festoons from the windows like decorations for a festal day. Now we were in a lane so narrow that there was scarce room for our carriage, which must drive on a walk lest it run over some of the children that swarm out of the crowded tenement; now in an avenue so broad as to give abundant room to the trolley line in the center of the avenue without discommoding the carriages; now we were looking up between the tenements at a narrow strip of blue sky overhead, as we might look up from the bottom of a sunless canon in Colorado; now we were looking off from a plaza on the brow of one of the encircling hills upon the city below and the harbor around which the city clusters; now we had as street companions half - dressed children and hard, weary - faced women, with colored kerchiefs for head-gear, and short skirts and sometimes ragged and dirty ones; now we had fine ladies reclining at ease in luxurious carriages as they who had never known either work or care, and theatrically appareled nurses with babies as much overdressed in their fluffy garments as their infantile brothers in the poorer quarters were underdressed in their rags and tatters. And yet in it all a certain picturesqueness of color, and, to the stranger, oddity of fashion, which went far to redeem the one aspect from mere ostentation and the other from mere squalor.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Impressions of a Careless Traveler
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
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
My God is in the hearts of those that seek Him ... And in my heart I carry an assurance of His love that life cannot disturb. I know His love as the babe knows its mother's love, lying upon her breast. It knows her love though it neither understands her nature nor her ways.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish