American theologian and author (1835-1922)
Vengeance does not satisfy. It sometimes gluts, but it does not satisfy. The duelist, angered by insult or wrong, challenges his enemy to a duel, runs his sword through the body of his opponent, leaves the life-blood oozing out of his arteries, wipes his sword, and walks off in the brightness of the morning. Satisfied? Never! Nemesis follows him; the vision is ever before his eyes; he has taken his vengeance, and the vengeance itself nestles in his heart and breeds future penalty.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Conscience is the factor which recognizes the inherent and essential distinction between right and wrong, and which impels to the right and dissuades from the wrong. It does not come within the province of this book to discuss either the basis of ethics or its laws; to consider either why some things are wrong and others are right, nor to point out what is wrong and what is right. That belongs to moral science, not to mental science. It must suffice here to say that the distinction between right and wrong is recognized in all peoples, and is one of the first objects of perception in childhood. Standards differ in different races and in different ages. The power of moral discrimination is subject to education both for good and for evil. But the sense of ought is as universal as the sense of beauty. That there is a right and a wrong is as evident to every mind as that there is a wise and a foolish, a beautiful and an ugly, a pleasant and a disagreeable.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
Perhaps the lack of the parish is quite as painfully felt in other departments as in the pulpit. The Church is without a head. It flounders about like a headless chicken; excuse the homely simile, which has nothing but truth to commend it. When Mrs. Beale died last week, we had to send to Wheatensville to get a minister to attend the funeral. When Sallie D. was married she sent there, too, for a minister. He was out of town, and the ceremony came near being delayed a week for want of him. The prayer-meeting lags. Little coldnesses between church members break out into open quarrels. There is no one to weld the dissevered members. Poor old Mother Lang, who has not left her bed for five years, laments bitterly her loss, and asks me every time I call to see her, "When will you get a pastor?" The Young People's Association begins to droop. Even the Sunday-school shows signs of friction, though Deacon Goodsole succeeds in keeping it in tolerably good running order by his imperturbable good humor. One advantage we have gained by this interregnum-only one. Even Mr. Hardcap is convinced that pastoral labors are not so unimportant as he had imagined.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
All nations and all eras appear also to be gathered here. There are Swiss cottages with overhanging chambers, and Italian villas with flat roofs, and Gothic structures with incipient spires that look as though they had stopped in their childhood and never got their growth, and Grecian temples with rows of wooden imitations of marble pillars of Doric architecture, and one house in which all nations and eras combine—a Grecian porch, a Gothic roof, an Italian L, and a half finished tower of the Elizabethan era, capped with a Moorish dome, the whole approached through the stiffest of all stiff avenues of evergreens, trimmed in the latest French fashion. That is Mr. Wheaton's residence, the millionaire of Wheathedge. I wish I could say he was as Catholic as his dwelling house.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
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
As I look back, I can remember something of the view which it seems to me I held when I was entering into the ministry. It was something like this: There is a great and good God. He is somewhere in the centre of the universe — whether in the body or out of the body I knew not, and yet in my conception I embodied him. He is the creator and the ruler of the world. He had made the world. I conceived of him as making the world as an architect makes a building. I rather think somewhere, in some of my earlier sermons, that figure would be found worked out — he had turned it in a lathe; he had erected the pillars; he had woven the carpet of grass; he had ornamented it with the flowers. You have heard that from other ministers, and no doubt you would have heard it from me when I was a young man. And as I conceived of God creating the world as an engineer creates an engine, so also I conceived of him regulating this world as an engineer regulates the engine. When men said to me, "Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe that God has set aside natural law?" I said, " Oh, no, but he uses natural law. As an engineer uses the steam and the fire, or as an electric engineer uses the electricity, so God uses the forces of nature. He is in his engine, with his hand on the lever; he can add to its speed or he can diminish its speed, or he can halt it, or he can make it go backward, or he can turn it in the one direction or the other direction. He made the engine and he rules the engine." Something like that was my conception of God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
The object of the American college in 1850 was to prepare the student for one of the three learned professions — law, medicine, or the ministry. I do not think that any one of the members of my class looked forward to another than one of these three careers. Engineering was not regarded as a learned profession, nor journalism, nor literature, nor music, nor art, nor acting, nor agriculture, nor teaching, nor business. For business what was needed was not education, but experience. Teaching was not a profession. Very few chose it as their life work. College professors frequently, college presidents almost uniformly, were clergymen who from choice or necessity had left the pulpit for the college chair; other teachers had generally taken up the work for bread-andbutter reasons or en route to something else. The farmer looked upon "book larnin'" with good-humored contempt, not without some justification, since the agricultural books and papers of that day were largely the work of academicians without practical experience.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
The question has been and will be asked whether he who believes in the evolution of revelation must not believe that spiritual development will not give the Church greater prophets than Israel, and greater apostles than Paul; whether, in short, it is not time to construct a new Bible out of modern literature, which will take the place of the older Bible, composed wholly of Hebrew literature. It might, perhaps, be a sufficient reply, for one in a polemical mood, that there is no objection to the construction of such a Bible, which, when constructed, would have to take its place with the Hebrew Bible in a struggle for existence with a resultant survival of the fittest. Certainly no one who believes in the Bible as a supreme book would fear the challenge. It might be further added that most devout souls do supplement the Bible by other and more modern devotional literature. We nourish our spiritual life, not only on the lyrics of the Hebrew Psalter, but also on those of Faber and Whittier; not only on the stories of Ruth and Esther, but also on that of the Pilgrim's Progress; not only on the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, but also on the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis and the Holy Living and the Holy Dying by Jeremy Taylor. The spirit of the Bible has run far beyond the confines of that ancient literature; and wherever one finds in spoken or in written word that which clarifies faith, strengthens hope, and enriches love, he is finding a Bible message, whoever interprets it to him.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
The story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the most extraordinary in the Old Testament. It is singularly attested by the imperishable witness of the mountains and the sea. Skepticism may scout at the plagues of Egypt; may smile incredulously at the marvelous deliverance of Israel through the Red Sea; may look with ill-concealed pity upon those who, fed daily by God's bounty, believe that God fed the hungry Israelites in the wilderness; may account the stories of the marvels which he wrought in answer to the prayers of Elijah the legends of a romantic age, and reject with ridicule the assertion of the apostle that the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous man availeth much; it will find nowhere in the Bible a story more extraordinary and intrinsically incredible than that of the destruction of the cities of the plain. Yet to deny this, it must not only impugn the sacred writers, but must also repudiate the traditions of heathen nations reported by secular historians, and refuse to listen to the silent testimony of nature itself. For, until the vision of Ezekiel is fulfilled, and the sacred waters, flowing from God's holy hill, heal the waters of the Salt Sea and give life again to this valley of death—until mercy shall conquer justice in nature as it already has in human experience, this scene of desolation will remain, a terrible witness to the reality of God's justice, and the fearfulness of his judgments.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Man is equipped with various senses, each of which has its own peculiar function. It can perform that function, and no other. The ear can hear, but it cannot see; the eye can see, but it cannot taste; the palate can taste, but it cannot smell. The body is composite. It is made up of different organs or faculties. The whole man is an orchestra; each organ is a single instrument. If that is broken, or gets out of tune, no other can take its place. Now some persons suppose that the mind is similarly a composite; that it is made up of a variety of faculties and powers; that there is one power or faculty which reasons, another which compares, a third which remembers or recalls, a fourth which imagines, etc. Those who hold this opinion, however, are not agreed as to how many mental faculties or powers there are. Some suppose there are very few, others that there are very many. A very common classification or division of the mind is into three powers or classes of powers: the reason, the sensibilities or feelings, and the will. Others divide these generic classes again into a great variety of reasoning and feeling powers, each confined to its own exercise or function, as the ear to hearing and the eye to seeing.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
We rode along in silence. Willie Gear was his father's pride and pet. He was a noble boy. He inherited his mother's tenderness and patience, and with them his father's acute and questioning intellect. He was a curious combination of a natural skeptic and a natural believer. He had welcomed the first step toward converting our Bible-class into a mission Sabbath-school, and had done more than any one else to fill it up with boys from the Mill village. He was a great favorite with them all and their natural leader in village sports and games. There was no such skater or swimmer for his age as Willie Gear, and he was the champion ball-player of the village. But I remember him best as a Sabbath-school scholar. I can see even now his earnest upturned face and his large blue eyes, looking strait into his mother's answering gaze, and drinking in every word she uttered to that mission-class which he had gathered and which she every Sabbath taught. He was not very fortunate in his teacher in our own church Sabbath-school. For he took nothing on trust and his teacher doubted nothing. I can easily imagine how his soul filled with indignation at the thought of Abraham's offering up his only son as a burnt sacrifice, and how with eager questioning he plied his father, unsatisfied himself with the assurances of one who had never experienced a like perplexity, and therefore did not know how to cure it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
It is not a bad method, by the way, of judging a sermon to try it and see how it works in actual experiment.
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
"The Psalms of David have supplied the Christian church with its best psalmody for nearly three thousand years," continued I. "They constitute the reservoir from which Luther, and Watts, and Wesley, and Doddridge, and a host of other singers have drawn their inspiration, and in which myriads untold have found the expression of their highest and holiest experiences, myriads who never heard of Homer. They are surely as well worth studying as his noble epics."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
If I am to tell you how to grow old gracefully, I must tell you at the beginning of life; for no man can grow old gracefully unless he begins early.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
A man is no less a person because he can speak in New York and be heard in Chicago, or press a button in Washington and set machinery in motion in Omaha. Extension of power does not lessen the personality of him who exercises it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
But order is not itself a virtue: it is only a means to an end. The end is general comfort and general convenience, and she never sacrifices the end to the means.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
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
Literature, music, art, and the stage were thought to be only for bohemians, who were regarded as the unpractical estrays of life who could do nothing better than act, paint, play, and write stories.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
Man is not only the supreme result of evolution thus far, — he is the final result of evolution; there is nothing beyond him. If one asks, How do we know that there may not be something inconceivable to us beyond? the answer is, We cannot know; but in our attempt to unriddle the enigma of the universe we must think with our faculties and be governed by our limitations, and we can conceive nothing higher than man. We can conceive of man infinitely improved; we can conceive of him cultivated, developed, enlarged, enriched, purified; but of anything essentially higher than man — no. Nothing can be conceived higher than to think, to will, to love. If we look back along the pages of history, these two truths we have learned from the universe: first, that all its processes have been for the purpose of manifesting One who thinks, who wills, who loves; second, that the purpose in the manifestation of this One is the creation of a race of free moral agents, who can themselves think and will and love. The inorganic world existed before the vegetable, and the vegetable world existed before the animal, and the lower animal existed before man, but man exists for nothing beyond. The very topmost round of the ladder has been reached: to know right from wrong, to do the right and eschew the wrong, to understand invisible distinctions, to perceive the invisible world, to struggle toward something higher and yet higher, and yet always to know, to resolve, to love, — this is supreme.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist