American theologian and author (1835-1922)
No equipment was thought necessary for the lower ranks in journalism, and no equipment was thought adequate for the higher ranks. Journalists, like poets, were born, not made.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
The true coronation of character is love. The true test of love is self-sacrifice. He knows not how to love who knows not how to suffer for love's sake. The love that costs nothing is worth—what it costs.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. Belief in the reality of religion involves belief that God is, and that He stands in some personal relation to man. But it is not an opinion respecting God, nor an opinion respecting His influence in the world of men. It is a personal consciousness of God. It is a human experience, but an experience of relationship with One who transcends humanity. The creed is not religion; the creed is a statement of what certain men think about religion. Worship is not religion; worship is a method of expressing religion. The church is not religion; the church is an organization of men and women, formed for the purpose of promoting religion. Religion precedes creeds, worship, church; that is, the life precedes men's thoughts about the life, men's expression of the life, men's organizations formed to promote the life. Religion may be personal or social; that is, it may be the consciousness of God in the individual soul, or it may be the concurrent consciousness of God in a great number of individuals, producing a social or communal life. In either case it is a life, not an opinion about life. It is not a definition of God, it is fellowship with Him; not a definition of sin, but sorrow because of sin; not a definition of forgiveness, but relief from remorse; not a definition of redemption, but a new and divine life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
The forgiveness of sins is, in my thinking of it, no longer an exceptional, episodical manifestation of a supernatural grace; it is the revelation and effect of the habit of mind of the Eternal Father toward all his children. The laws of forgiveness are a part of the laws of the Almighty and the All-gracious. It is said that the violation of natural law is never forgiven. It is said that if you put your finger in the candle, it will burn, pray as you will, and if you fall from your horse, you will break a bone, however pious you may be; whether the bone breaks or not depends, not upon your piety, but upon your age. Is it indeed true that there is no forgiveness in natural law? What a strange-looking audience this would be if there were none. The boy cuts his finger and nature begins to heal it; he breaks his arm — nature begins to knit the bone; he burns his finger — nature provides a new skin. Nature, that is, God, implants in man himself the help-giving powers that remove disease; and, in addition, stores the world full of remedies also, so that specifics may be found for almost every disease to which flesh is heir. The laws of healing are wrought into the physical realm; they are a part of the divine economy; and shall we think that He who helps the man to a new skin and to a new bone cares nothing for his moral nature, and will not help him when he has fallen into sin?
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
But trust in God does not take the place of common sense. I have read stories of devout Christians carrying their perplexities to God, then opening their Bible, and taking the first verse they lighted on as an indication of his will. But I never found in the Bible any authority for this use of it. It is no sibyl's book, no conjurer's cards. This was not Eliezer's way. He exercised his own best judgment, then asked God's blessing on it. Piety is a poor apology for intellectual laziness. Even in the littlest things God works out our salvation for us only when we work it out for ourselves, with the trembling and fear of eagerness. If the compass had been discovered in the days of Moses, Israel would never have seen the pillar of cloud and fire. It is said of Mr. Spurgeon, that when he was first applied to, to inaugurate an orphan asylum, by a lady who put into his hands several thousand pounds for the purpose, he hesitated. He perceived that it was a great undertaking, that it would require a large expenditure of money as well as of time. At last he devoted a day of fasting and prayer to the consideration of the subject. He resolved to undertake the enterprise only in case God should put into his hands a farther sum adequate to commence it. Within twenty-four hours he received by post from an unknown donor the required sum, to be appropriated by him, in his discretion, for Christ's cause. He accepted God's answer. The asylum was founded. It is thus God directs those who look to him for guidance. Life itself becomes luminous. Ways open in which God means that we shall walk. Ways are hedged up before us from which he would turn us aside.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Whatever may be thought of "woman's sphere," it is certain that its boundaries have been steadily enlarged; that an increased liberty, not only of secular employments and civil rights, but also of social intercourse, has been accorded to her with increasing civilization; and that, so far from losing, either in the delicacy and refinement of her own character, or in the chivalric homage paid to her by man, she has gained in both respects in the same ratio in which she has been freed from the trammels of an unnatural conventionalism, and elevated to a position of real equality with the dominant sex.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Mere philanthropy and humanity ... are not religion. There must also be piety. The soul must live in the divine presence; must inhale the Spirit of God; must utter its contrition, its weaknesses, its wants, and its thanks-givings to its Heavenly Father.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The first minister was too old; he would not suit the young folks. The second, just out of the seminary, was too young; the old folks said he had not experience. The third had experience. He had been in a parish three years. He was still young, with the elastic hopes and strong enthusiasm of youth. But he was a bachelor. The people pretty universally declared that the minister should have a wife and a house. The women all said there must be somebody to organize the sewing circles, and to lead the female prayer-meetings. The fourth was married, but he had three or four children. We could not support him. The fifth was a most learned man, who told us the original Greek or Hebrew of his texts, and, morning or evening, never came nearer to America than Rome under Augustus Csar. He was dull. The sixth afforded us a most brilliant pyrotechnic display. He spluttered, and fizzed, and banged, as though Fourth of July himself had taken orders and gone to preaching. The young people were carried away. But the old folks all said he was sensational.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
When I first came to Wheathedge the Calvary Presbyterian church was externally, to the passer-by, distinguished chiefly for the severe simplicity of its architecture, and the plainness, not to say the homeliness, of its surroundings. It is a long, narrow, wooden structure, as destitute of ornament as Squire Line's old fashioned barn. Its only approximation to architectural display is a square tower surmounted by four tooth-picks pointing heavenward, and encasing the bell. A singular, a mysterious bell that was and is. It expresses all the emotions of the neighborhood. It passes through all the moods and inflections of a hundred hearts. To-day it rings out with soft and sacred tones its call to worship. To-morrow from its watch-tower it sees the crackling flame in some neighboring barn or tenement, and utters, with loud and hurried and anxious voice, its alarm. Anon, heavy with grief, it seems to enter, as a sympathising friend, into the very heart experiences of bereaved and weeping mourners. And when the rolling year brings round Independence day, all the fluctuations of feeling which mature and soften others are forgotten, and it trembles with the excitement of the occasion, and laughs, and shouts, and capers merrily in its homely belfry, as though it were a boy again.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Did Adam fall, six thousand years ago? It is immaterial. Certainly if we found the story of a garden with one fruit by eating which a man would make himself immortal, and with another fruit which would give him a consciousness of good and evil, with a serpent which talked to him, and with a God who walked in the garden and from whom the man attempted to hide, — if we found that in Greek, or Roman, or Hindu, or Norse literature, we should say, That is beautiful fable; what truth can we find in it? And I do not see any reason why, finding it in Hebrew literature, we should not say, That is beautiful fable; what truth is in that fable?
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
The mother who tries to keep her child away from all temptation simply prepares the boy for a terrible fall when he gets old enough to leave the home. It is not by taking away the bonds, it is by giving strength to the man that he may break the bonds, that he is redeemed. Every man is like a Samson bound by his enemies, and he must acquire the strength within himself to break them.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
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
As society is educated under the teaching of God's Gospel, it passes by a natural reaction from hatred of sin into simple compassion and pity. Then we pick the drunkard out of the gutter, and coddle him and set him up on the platform to be straightway our teacher; for we have now no sense of wrath against inordinate appetite. We are overwhelmed with pity for the murderer, with no restraining sense of justice against him, and send him gifts, — broiled chicken and costly flowers, — and parade his name in the newspapers almost as a hero to be worshiped. We say that we are charitable. In fact we have forgotten that which is the basis of all moral character, — to abhor that which is evil. As the first century represented the state of indifference to iniquity, as the Middle Ages represented the state of wrath against iniquity, so this nineteenth century often represents morbid sentiments of pity. We are not so much concerned with the drunkard as with his headache and his misery. We are not so much troubled by covetousness as by poverty, and are more eager to form anti-poverty societies than anti-covetous societies. It is the evil which sins bring upon men that brings sorrow to our hearts rather than sin itself. Nor shall we come into a moral state which is worthy of the children of God until we have taken these two factors, wrath against sin and pity because of sin, and found a way to unite them in one common experience. Not merely wrath against sin and pity for the sinner. No woman who is pure but must have felt a sense of revulsion from the impure woman. No man who is perfectly truthful but must have felt a sense of loathing for a liar. No man who is honest but must have felt a sense of antagonism, hate, wrath, indignation — call it what you will, there are no words adequate to express it — for the dishonest man. And yet with this sense of indignation against that which is iniquitous and shameful, there is also in the heart a great pity for the sinful man. We both hate him and sorrow for him; and out of these two combined experiences there grows mercy.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
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 personal God. I repeat what I have already said in this volume, that I am a theistic evolutionist; that is, I believe that the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed, which is the All in all, is an Energy that thinks, feels, and wills, — a self-conscious, intelligent, moral Being. Evolution does not claim to be the last word. There is no last word. Evolution itself is inconsistent with the idea that there can be any last word. The doctrine of evolution is the doctrine of perpetual growth, and therefore every word spoken prepares for another and a further word. If it is to be accepted at all, it is to be accepted as, on the whole, the grandest generalization of our age, if not of any age, — the best statement of the process of life that has yet been uttered.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
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
We are not, however, to judge of a truth beforehand by the fruit which we think it will produce. It is the truth which makes free, not any kind of error. It is the truth which sanctifies men, not any kind of falsehood. All truth is safe. All error is dangerous. It is only the truth that the minister is to use. He is never to say, "This is the philosophy that my people are used to and this is the philosophy that I think will do better service, and so, though I do not believe it, I will preach it." Never! It is only the truth he is to use, but he is always to use the truth. Truth is always an instrument.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
The street-walkers were much more in evidence then than they are to-day; or is it only that they were more in evidence to a youth under seventeen than they are to a man over seventy? I do not think that is all. That I should not be accosted now as I often was then is natural enough; but I have eyes to see and some common sense to judge whether the women I see upon the broad and well-lighted streets between eleven and twelve o'clock are professionals or not. The upper gallery in most, if not all, of the theaters was reserved for such women, where they might ply their trade, and no woman was allowed on the floor or in the first gallery of most theaters unless accompanied by a man as a guarantee of her respectability.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
I have feelings, but my pen cannot and will not write feelings; nay, my heart has no mind that can coin them into words.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
Commerce is a form of warfare.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott