LYMAN ABBOTT QUOTES II

American theologian and author (1835-1922)

Lyman Abbott quote

Every soul is a battlefield.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott

Tags: souls


Imagine for one moment that God desires to reveal Himself to the human race; how can He make that revelation except in the terms of a human experience? This is what He has done. He who, in olden time, spoke through prophets; He who, from the beginning, was the Word, when the race, in the spiritual process of its development, was ready for that later disclosure, entered into one human life and filled it full of Himself, that by looking at that life we might comprehend what the life of God is in the world. This is what the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews declares: "God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds." First in fragments, in partial utterances, in broken speech He revealed little parts of Himself; these men can comprehend only in single letters which men must learn, — for they must understand the alphabet before they can understand the grammar of divinity; later He comes and fills one man with Himself and makes that One stand out in human life as the revelation and disclosure of Himself. This is what John says: "That which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and which our hands handled, concerning the Word of life, . . . declare we unto you." As the artist transcends all his pictures, as the orator transcends all his speeches, so God transcends all manifestations of God. It is that concerning the Word which the beloved disciple has seen, and that only, which he can declare to others. This is the meaning of the heavenly voice: "This is my beloved Son." He is the Son of God, because all his life is brooded by, begotten of, proceeds from the Father. Some of our life does, and some does not. We walk in the world like Siamese twins, joined together, now speaking the life of God, and now speaking the life of the world. We are Seventh of Romans, flesh and spirit in combat with each other; sons of the earth and sons of God strangely commingled. He was the only begotten Son of God, because all his life flowed from the divine fountain and the divine source. This is the meaning of such declarations as that of Paul: "In him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." He was One into whom the holy affluence of the divine nature was poured, that He might set it forth to men. This is the meaning of Paul's other declaration: "God was in Christ." Jesus Christ was the tabernacle in whom the self-revealing God dwelt, and through whom He revealed Himself. In short, Jesus Christ was God manifest in the flesh; that is, such a manifestation of God as was possible in a human life, a manifestation of what Dr. van Dyke has well called " the human life of God."

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Theology of an Evolutionist

Tags: God


There must be some honest lawyers at the New York bar, and some impartial judges on the New York bench, but I should not like to be set to find them.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish

Tags: New York


When the Bible is thus regarded as the sifted literature of a people whose genius was spiritual, as the genius of Rome was legal, as that of Greece was philosophical, and as that of the Anglo-Saxon has been commercial, the intellectual and moral difficulties disappear which the unscriptural dogma of infallibility has created. He who thus believes in the evolution of revelation no longer has to tease his mind by arguing that the creative days were aeons, that the sun standing still was an optical delusion due to peculiar refraction of its rays, and that some whales have throats big enough to allow the passage of a man. He frankly treats the stories of creation, of Joshua's campaign, and of Jonah's adventures as literature characteristic of the childhood age of the world, and looks for the moral lessons which lie behind them.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Theology of an Evolutionist

Tags: genius


The story of Sodom and Gomorrah epitomizes the Gospel. Every act in the great, the awful drama of life is here foreshadowed. The analogy is so perfect that we might almost be tempted to believe that this story is a prophetic allegory, did not nature itself witness its historic truthfulness.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths

Tags: life


If, then, fellow-Christian, you are sometimes perplexed by arguments which you can not answer, recur to this hidden witness on whose testimony your faith is really founded. If the Bible is really the bread of life to your soul, if it gives comfort to you in affliction, peace in storm, victory in sore battle, you need no other evidence that it is the Word of God. If Christ is to you a present help, if you hear his voice counseling you, and see his luminous form guiding you, and hear in your own soul his message to your troubled conscience," Peace, be still," you need no other argument, as you can have no higher one, that he is Savior and God to you. This sight of the soul is above all reason. Mary, hearing the message of the disciples that Christ was arisen, believed it not. Coming to the sepulchre, and finding it empty, even the declaration of the angel was insufficient to assure her. But the voice of her Lord, though he but uttered in well-known accents her name, "Mary," was enough. She doubted, could doubt no more. It is not on the witness of men, nor even on that of angels, our faith in a crucified and a risen Savior rests; but on this, that he has spoken our name, and turned, by the very sweetness of his voice, our night of weeping into a day of unutterable joy. "Now we believe, not because of thy saying; for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world."

LYMAN ABBOTT

Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths

Tags: soul


I look out upon the universe and I see that it is a universe, a variety in unity. I see that there is a unity in all the phenomena of nature, and that science has more and more made that unity clear, and I see that there is one Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed. And I see too, it seems to me very clearly, that this Energy is an intellectual Energy; that is, that the physical phenomena of the universe are intellectually related to one another. The scientist does not create the relations; he finds them. They are; he discovers them. All science is thinking the thoughts of God after him. It is finding thought where thought has done its intellectual work; it is learning what are those intellectual relationships which have been in and are embodied in creation.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Seeking After God

Tags: universe


I am convinced that no mere intellectual opinion is a sin. If Mr. Gear is in darkness it is because he neglects some known if not some recognized duty. My work is not to convince him of the error of his opinions. I probably never could do that. And his opinions are not of much consequence. My work is to find out what known duty he is neglecting, and press it home upon his conscience. And so far I have not discovered what it is. He is one of the most conscientious men I ever knew. Yet something is wanting in Mr. Gear. I believe he half thinks so himself. He is mentally restless and uneasy. He seems to doubt his own doubts, and to want discussion that he may strengthen himself in his own unbelief. But still I make no progress. Since that first night I have got no farther into his heart.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish

Tags: duty


The Bible always anticipates something higher, larger, nobler than was ever known in the past. When Abraham goes out of the land of paganism to a land he knows not what, he is not called back to Eden. When Moses calls the children of Israel out of the land of Goshen into the Promised Land, it is to a new land that is to be opened up to them; their looking back is continually reprobated and condemned. When the exiles are called out of Babylon, it is not with any conception that the old condition of things is to be restored; it is to a new and larger glory, when " Gentiles shall come to thy light, and the nations to thy rising." When Christ comes, He never bids His disciples look back for the golden age. He tells them of a kingdom to come, not of a kingdom that has been. He tells them that greater works than He has done, His disciples shall do; the future has more for them than the past. Paul never suggests that the race is to go back to Eden, to Isaiah, to David, to Moses. His call is always toward a nobler future. Finally, the last book of the Bible is a prophetic book; the garden it portrays is not the garden of Eden. In this garden of the Apocalypse the very leaves are for the healing of the nations, and the fruit is of many kinds, yielded every month, and all freely to be plucked; and alongside this garden is the great city, the New Jerusalem, the fruit of centuries of Christian civilization.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Theology of an Evolutionist

Tags: future


There are many in the Church of Christ who think of God as a just and punitive God, who must be satisfied either by penalty laid on the guilty, or by an equivalent for the penalty. That is one form of paganism. There are many who, reacting against that conception, think of God as an indifferent, careless God, who does not care much about iniquity, does not trouble Himself about it, is not disturbed by it! That is another form of paganism. And there are many who try to solve the problem by thinking of two Gods, a just God and a merciful God, and imagining that the merciful God by the sacrifice of Himself appeases the wrath of the just God. That also is a modified form of paganism. The one transcendent truth which distinguishes Christianity from all forms of paganism is that it represents God as appeasing His own wrath or satisfying His own justice by the forthputting of His own love. But He saves men from their sins by an experience which we can interpret to ourselves only by calling it a struggle between the sentiments of justice and pity.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Theology of an Evolutionist

Tags: God


The Reformation broke down the ecclesiastical system for the Reformers and the children of the Reformers. The Protestant world said, " The Pope is not the vicar of God; the Church is not the supreme and final authority." The Church had held to the sacredness of the Bible, but to the Bible as the constitution of the Church. It was not for the common people; it was for the Church; and the Church was to interpret it and to declare its meaning. The Protestant Reformers went back of the Church, of the priesthood, of the human mediators, to the Bible. They said, " Any man may take this constitution; any man may interpret it." But still Protestantism accepted and adopted — unconsciously, perhaps — the notion of an absentee God. Still God was conceived of as enthroned in the centre of the universe, as the Moral Governor; and laws as edicts issued from him; and sin as disobedience to those laws; and forgiveness as remission of a future penalty; and the Bible as the book of his laws, and an authoritative statement of certain conditions precedent to obtaining that forgiveness.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Seeking After God

Tags: church


Stop a minute. I may as well say here that this book is written in confidence. It is personal. It deals with the interior history of a very respectable church and some most respectable families. It contains a great deal that is not proper to be communicated to the public. The reader will please bear this in mind. Whatever I say, particularly what I am going to say now, is confidential. Don't mention it.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish

Tags: church


Christ's sympathies are broader and His love is larger than we think.... We hedge him round with our poor creeds, and shut Him up in our little churches, and think He works only in our appointed ways. He breaks over the barriers we put about him, and carries on His work of love in hearts that we think are beyond all reach of Him or us. We cannot tell our brother how to find the light. The light will find him.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish

Tags: Jesus


In short, there is a spiritual sense which directly and immediately perceives the world of invisible truth. In this domain it rules supreme. It has no rival, no peer. It alone is competent to investigate spiritual truth. The time will come when education will systematically develop this faculty, which it now systematically neglects; for at present it is unrecognized. Science has not heard of it. It finds no place in the customary classification of the faculties. Neither Hamilton, nor Spurzheim, nor Bain, nor Spencer recognize it. But the Bible is full of it. Life, in which are many things undreamed of in our yet partial philosophy, abounds in the manifestations of it. Moses witnesses to it. David sings of it. Isaiah, with more than mortal eloquence, portrays the immortal truths which it has revealed to him. Paul is endowed with preternatural power, because it discloses to him the sublime mysteries of the wisdom of God, which none of the princes of this world knew. And an innumerable host of Christians, strengthened, sustained, comforted by its hidden life, bear witness by their lives to its reality and its efficacy.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths

Tags: life


I always went to church. Of my religious experience I shall speak hereafter, tracing it through the various stages of its growth from boyhood to old age. Enough to say here that I cannot share the belief of those who think, or perhaps I should say feel, that the church has degenerated in the last half-century. During a part of that time I attended the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church. Some forty or fifty boys and girls from an orphan asylum made what seemed to me an important part of the congregation. The boys sat in one gallery, the girls in the gallery opposite. I do not recall that I ever heard the minister tell a story, use an illustration, or point a moral lesson which by any possibility could appeal to these children. There may have been connected with this church some mission chapel, but I do not think so. If so, it was not in evidence. I do not think I ever heard of one. The attitude of the churches in New York City was then much what the attitude of the village church is to-day: its duty was to care for the individuals and the families in its own congregation. For these attendants there were plenty of services — not to say a surplus; but going out into the world preaching the Gospel to every creature was left to be done by the missionary societies, which were supported by the churches with more or less liberality. Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and some time later Dr. W. S. Rainsford in New York, were pioneers in church missionary work. It hardly need be said that there was no social settlement work and no Young Women's Christian Association; the Young Men's Christian Association was just coming into existence.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Reminiscences

Tags: church


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

Tags: universe


He who says, "I know no fear," is no hero. No man knows courage unless he does know fear, and has that in him which is superior to fear, and conquers it.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Theology of an Evolutionist

Tags: heroes


The ideal of character always runs beyond the attainment.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott

Tags: character


But the heart finds no refuge in an Infinite and an Eternal Energy from which all things proceed. That refuge is found only in the faith that God has entered a human life, taken the helm, ruled heart and hand and tongue, written in terms of human experience the biography of God in history, revealed in the teaching of Christ the truth of God, in the life of Christ the character of God, in the passion of Christ the suffering of God.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Letters to Unknown Friends


Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the preacher. To which I add, especially husbands. No man is proof against the flatteries of love. At least I am not, and I am glad of it.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish

Tags: love