American theologian and author (1835-1922)
Of course, we must trim the Sunday school-room as well as the Church, for the children must have their Christmas; and trimmed it was, so luxuriantly that it seemed as though the woods had laid siege to and taken possession of the sanctuary, and that nature was preparing to join on this glad day her voice with that of man in singing praise to Him who brings life to a winter-wrapped earth, and whose fittest symbol, therefore, is the tree whose greenness not even the frosts of the coldest winter have power to diminish.
LYMAN ABBOTT
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Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
There are modern writers on law that may be as valuable as Moses; there are poems of Browning and Tennyson and our own Whittier that are far more pervaded with the Christlike spirit than some on the Hebrew Psalmody. But there is no life like the life of Christ.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
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
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
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
What has science to offer? This: that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed. No longer an absentee God; no longer a Great First Cause, setting in motion secondary causes which frame the world; no longer a divine mechanic, who has built the world, stored it with forces, launched it upon its course, and now and again interferes with its operation if it goes not right; but one great, eternal, underlying Cause, as truly operative to-day as he was in that first day when the morning stars sang together — every day a creative day. That is the word of science.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
Oh! fools and blind, not to know the Master whose servant nature is.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
When we got back to Wheathedge, Tuesday afternoon, we found the parsonage undergoing transformations so great that you would hardly know it. Miss Moore had got Mr. Hardcap, sure enough, to repair it. She had agreed to pay for the material, and he was to furnish the labor. The fence was straightened, and the gate re-hung, and the blinds mended up, and Mr. Hardcap was on the roof patching it where it leaked or threatened to. Deacon Goodsole had a bevy of boys from the Sabbath-school at work in the garden under his direction. If there is anything the Deacon takes a pride in, next to his horse, it is his garden, and he said that the parson should have a chance for the best garden in town. Great piles of weeds stood in the walk. Two boys were spading up; another was planting; a fourth was wheeling away the weeds; and still another was bringing manure from the Deacon's stable. Miss Moore was setting out some rose-bushes before the door; and the Deacon himself, with his coat off, was trimming and tying up a rather dilapidated looking grape-vine over a still more dilapidated grape arbor.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Warm hearts are better than great thoughts.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
When we got back to the Church we found it warm with a blazing fire in the great stove, and bright with a bevy of laughing girls, who emptied our sleigh of its contents almost before we were aware what had happened, and were impatiently demanding more. Miss Moore had proposed just to trim the pulpit-oh! but she is a shrewd manager-and we had brought evergreens enough to make two or three. But the plans had grown faster by far than we could work. One young lady had remarked how beautiful the chandelier would look with an evergreen wreath; a second had pointed out that there ought to be large festoons draping the windows; a third, the soprano, had declared that the choir had as good a right to trimming as the pulpit; a fourth, a graduate of Mount Holyoke, had proposed some mottoes, and had agreed to cut the letters, and Mr. Leacock, the store keeper, had been foraged on for pasteboard, and an extemporized table contrived on which to cut and trim them. So off we were driven again, with barely time to thaw out our half-frozen toes; and, in short, my half morning's job lengthened out to a long days hard but joyous work, before the pile of evergreens in the hall was large enough to supply the energies of the Christmas workers.
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
Father Hyatt is an old, old man. He has long since retired from active service, having worn out his best days here at Wheathedge, in years now long gone by. A little money left him by a parishioner, and a few annual gifts from old friends among his former people, are his means of support. His hair is white as snow. His hands are thin, his body bent, his voice weak, his eyesight dim, his ears but half fulfil their office; his mind even shows signs of the weakness and wanderings of old age; but his heart is young, and I verily believe he looks forward to the hour of his release with hopes as high and expectations as ardent as those with which, in college, he anticipated the hour of his graduation. This was the man, patriarch of the Church, who has lived to see the children he baptized grow up, go forth into the world, many die and be buried; who has baptized the second and even the third generation, and has seen Wheathedge grow from a cross-road to a flourishing village; who this afternoon, perhaps for the last time—I could not help thinking so as I sat in church—interpreted to us the love of Christ as it is uttered to our hearts in this most sacred and hallowed of all services. Very simply, very gently, quite unconsciously, he refuted the cheerless doctrine of the morning sermon, and pointed us to the Protestant doctrine of the Real Presence. Do you ask me what he said? Nothing. It was by his silence that he spoke.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Conscience is what? It is putting together a moral act and a moral ideal, and measuring the act by the ideal. It is putting this moral act which you do alongside the eternal laws of God, and seeing how it stands by those laws of God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
Never lie to a child about doctors or medicine or anything else; but if you feel, as some people seem to feel, that life without lying is an impossibility, at least don't lie about the amount of pain likely to result from a surgical procedure, or about the taste of some medicine. If you know that something to be done will hurt, say so; if a mixture to be swallowed is unpleasant, say so. If you deceive a child once in such matters, do not imagine that it will trust you again. You do not deserve trust, and you will not get it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The House and Home: A Practical Book
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
Every one went to church — every one with the exception of two or three families whom I looked upon with a kind of mysterious awe, as I might have looked upon a family without visible means of support and popularly suspected of earning a livelihood by counterfeiting or some similar lawless practice. The church itself was an old-fashioned brick Puritan meeting-house, equally free from architectural ornament without and from decoration within. The pews had been painted white; for some reason the paint had not dried, and the congregation, to protect their garments, had spread down upon the seats and backs of the pews newspapers, generally religious. When the paint at length dried the newspapers were pulled off, leaving the impression of their type reversed, and I used to interest myself during the long sermon in trying to decipher the hieroglyphic impressions. There was neither Sunday-School room nor prayer-meeting room. The Sunday-School was held in the church, and the parson at prayer-meeting took a seat in a pew about the center of the building, put a board across the back of the pews to hold his Bible and his lamp, and sat, except when speaking, with his back to the congregation. A great wood stove at the rear, with a smoke-pipe extending the whole length of the room to the flue in front, furnished the heat — none too much of it on cold winter days. Plain and even homely as was this meeting-house, associations have given to it a sacredness in my eyes which neither Gothic arch nor pictured window could have given to it. My grandfather was largely instrumental in constructing it. In its pulpit each of his five sons preached on occasions. One of them acted as its pastor for a year or more. A grandson and a great-grandson of his were here baptized. My earliest recollections of public worship and of Sunday-School teaching are associated with it. We four brothers have each at times played the organ in connection with its service of sacred song. My brother Edward and myself were both ordained to the Gospel ministry within its walls, and in its pulpit preached some of our first sermons. The church still exists, a flourishing organization, but the meeting-house was destroyed by fire in 1886, and its place has been taken by a more modern structure.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
Perhaps we expect time to work for us, when time is only given us that we may work.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Besides looking at the house we asked the usual house-hunting questions. Mr. Sinclair was in the city. He wanted to sell because he was going to Europe in the spring to educate his children. He would sell his place for $10,000 or rent it for $800. For the summer? No! for the year. He did not care to rent it for the summer, nor to give possession before fall. Would he rent the furniture? Yes, if one wanted it. But that would be extra. How much land was there? About two acres. Any fruit? Pears, peaches, and the smaller fruits—strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Whereupon Jennie and I bowed ourselves out and went away.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
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