American theologian and author (1835-1922)
Evolution is described by John Fiske as "God's way of doing things." Theology also may be described as an attempt to explain God's way of doing things. Thus, to a certain extent the science of evolution and the science of theology have the same ultimate end. Both attempt to furnish an orderly, rational, and self-consistent account of phenomena. The supposed inconsistency between science and religion is really an inconsistency between two sciences. The theologian and the scientist have given different, and to some extent inconsistent, accounts of God's way of doing things. It is important for us to know which account is correct. It is even religiously desirable that we should know, since our understanding of God's influence upon the human soul affects that influence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
When I went to college we studied chemistry sitting in our seats, while the professor of chemistry revealed certain chemical truths to us, performing the operations in the laboratory for us while we looked on. We saw them, went away, — and forgot what we had learned. To-day the student of chemistry goes into the laboratory himself. The teacher does not directly reveal the truth to him, but patiently inspires him to study for himself; encourages him, guides him, directs him, shows him how to make his own investigations. Under the influence of that guidance, that direction, that counsel, that inspiration, the student works out the chemical laws for himself as though he were a new investigator. He also gets a revelation. But it is a gradual revelation, under the inspiring influence of a teacher. The modern Christian evolutionist believes that revelation has been made in this manner to the world; that God has inspired men in their quest for truth, and that under that inspiration, studying, meditating, laboring, they find their way to the truth.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
In the southeast corner of Palestine, in a basin scooped out of the solid rock by some extraordinary pre-historic convulsion, lie the waters of what is fitly called the Dead Sea. The barren rocks which environ it crowd close to the water's edge. The almost impassable pathway which leads down their precipitous sides has no parallel even among the dangerous passes of the Alps and the Apennines. From the surface of this singular lake there perpetually arises a misty exhalation, as though it were steam from a vast caldron, kept at boiling point by infernal fires below. No fish play in these deadly waters. When now .and then one ventures hither from the Jordan, he pays for his temerity with his life. No birds make here their nests. No fruits flourish along these inhospitable shores, save the apples of Sodom, fair to the eye, but turning to dust and ashes in the hand of him that plucks them. The few miserable men that still make their home in this accursed valley are dwarfed, and stunted, and sickly, as those that live in the shadowy border land that separates life from death.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
It is a poor sort of fatalism which makes men fold their hands and wait for fortune.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
A Miracle — that is, an extraordinary event arresting attention and awakening wonder, accomplishing some beneficent work, and by its manifestation of a superhuman power serving as a sign of a divine message or messenger — may either be in accordance with human experience or may transcend human experience. The first is as truly a miracle as the second; what constitutes it a miracle is not that it is an event out of the ordinary course of nature, but that it serves effectually as a sign of superhuman power in the accomplishment of a moral end. The two greatest miracles of the Old Testament are not events transcending human experience; they were wrought by what we customarily call natural forces, and in accordance with what we call natural laws. What made them miracles was such an evident connection with a moral end that they served as signs of the directing presence of a moral Person, possessing superhuman power. The first of these miracles was the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the second the passage of the Red Sea by the children of Israel.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
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 light that shines from the Old Testament is that of the Star of Bethlehem, which conducts the reader to the manger of his Incarnate Lord. That star I seek to follow.
LYMAN ABBOTT
preface, Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
It is common, even in the pulpit, to hear the phrase, "Man has a soul;" and it is scarcely possible to avoid embodying this same thought sometimes in the phrase "man's soul," which is only an abbreviation. This phrase, however, expresses a falsehood. It is not true that man has a soul. Man is a soul. It would be more accurate to say that man has a body. We may say that the body has a soul, or that the soul has a body; as we may say that the ship has a captain, or the captain has a ship; but we ought never to forget that the true man is the mental and spiritual; the body is only the instrument which the mental and the spiritual uses.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
So long as the creed is a window, and we see God through it, it is good ... but when men are content simply to believe in the creed, or in the church, or in the Bible, they are worshipping idols.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
What is the word of history? The historian tells us there is a progress in human development, and that history illustrates that progress, and that not only the individual man grows from babyhood to manhood, but the whole race of men grow from infantile beginnings to a future, we know not what. Is there any meaning in this? Is there any power behind it? And what does this power mean? And, again, we turn to a historian, not a theologian, — not even an orthodox historian, — to Matthew Arnold. He tells that the one thing history makes sure is that there is a power not ourselves that makes for righteousness; a power to-day at work in the world as truly and as efficaciously as ever in the past; that the evolutionary processes that are going on are making for righteousness.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
This is what Jesus Christ came to do. Not to show how we can escape hell and get into heaven, but to show how we can escape from ourselves and become other selves; to show how we may cease to be what we are and become what we desire to be. He came that he might teach us and empower us to be the men we want to be, the men we ought to be.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
What most impressed me about Gibraltar was not Gibraltar but the snow-capped mountains opposite. Africa and mountains! Africa and snow-capped mountains! Of course I had read of the Pillars of Hercules, and knew that Gibraltar had his twin opposite. Of course I knew that all northern Africa was not sandy desert. And yet I could not believe my eyes. No! These are not clouds resting on the top of the hills; they are snow-caps on the mountains. What is it, I wonder, that always so stirs me in the view of mountains? Other landscapes I forget, or carry in my memory only as a blurred photograph. But the mountains—the Camden hills seen from Penobscot Bay, the Mount Desert range seen from the ocean, the White Mountain range seen from Fryeburg, Pike's Peak from Colorado Springs, Mont Blanc from Chamounix, the Langdale Pikes in Westmoreland—shall I ever forget them? Coming to this range of African mountains from the sea, it greets me like an apparition of an old friend in an unexpected place. While the rest of the passengers are crowding the larboard side to watch Gibraltar, I come back again and again to the view of the African mountains on the opposite side.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Impressions of a Careless Traveler
Man possesses not merely the power to gather both from the outer and visible and from the inner and invisible world, a power both of sensuous and supersensuous observation; he possesses also a power of classifying and arranging the results of his observation, of observing resemblances and contrasts, and of drawing conclusions from them. This he does by the reflective faculties, or what is in popular language called the reason. Formerly it was supposed that the animals did not possess this power. A more careful and candid observation has brought scientific men to the conclusion that the higher animals—notably the dog, the horse, and the elephant—also reflect, consider, weigh, judge, compare; in a word, reason, though to a very limited extent and within very narrow bounds. The contrast between the animals and man is not that man possesses reflective faculties and the animals do not, but that man possesses apparently an unlimited capacity of developing both these and other faculties, while the limits are very soon reached in the animal; and man possesses the spiritual faculties—the supersensuous faculty of faith and the spiritual impulses of conscience, reverence, and love—in a high degree, while they are either entirely wanting in the brute, or exist only in the most rudimentary forms. For convenience of analysis the reflective faculties may be divided into two, the Logical faculty and the Comparative faculty, or causality and comparison.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
How few of us appreciate the fact that a very great deal of physical suffering in after life comes from bad mental training in childhood! I do not mean suffering of an imaginary kind; I mean disease which may entirely ruin a life which might have been of use to the world, and which surely would have been happier but for the lost health. Many a chronic invalid might have preserved his health had he been taught to use his brain properly when a child.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The House and Home: A Practical Book
If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
I acknowledge myself, then, a radical evolutionist, — it is hardly necessary to say a theistic evolutionist. I reverently and heartily accept the axiom of theology that a personal God is the foundation of all life; but I also believe that God has but one way of doing things ; that His way may be described in one word as the way of growth, or development, or evolution, terms which are substantially synonymous; that He resides in the world of nature and in the world of men; that there are no laws of nature which are not the laws of God's own being ; that there are no forces of nature, that there is only one divine, infinite force, always proceeding from, always subject to the will of God; that there are not occasional or exceptional theophanies, but that all nature and all life is one great theophany; that there are not occasional interventions in the order of life which bear witness to the presence of God, but that life is itself a perpetual witness to His presence; that He transcends all phenomena, and yet is the creative, controlling, directing force in all phenomena. In so far as the theologian and the evolutionist differ in their interpretation of the history of life — that is, upon the question whether God's way of doing things is a way of successive interventions or a continuous and unbroken progress — I agree with the evolutionist, not with the theologian. My object in this volume is to show that religion — that is, the life of God in the soul of man — is better comprehended, and will better be promoted, by the philosophy which regards all life as divine, and God's way of doing things as the way of a continuous, progressive change, according to certain laws and by means of one resident force, than by the philosophy which supposes that some things are done by natural forces and according to natural laws, and others by special interventions of a Divine Will, acting from without, for the purpose of correcting errors or filling gaps.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Was it not at Bunker Hill that the soldiers were directed to reserve their fire till the attacking party had exhausted theirs? That is the way Jennie conducts an argument—when she argues at all, which is very seldom. She accepted every consideration I had offered against uniting with the Wheathedge church, and yet I knew her opinion was not changed; and somehow my own began to waver. I wonder how that method of arguing would work in the court-room. I mean to try it some time.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
"The ten commandments have been before the world for over three thousand years," said I. "The number that have learned them and accepted them as a guide, and found in them a practical help is to be counted by millions. There is hardly a child in Wheathedge that does not know something of them, and has not been made better for them; and hardly a man who knows Solon even by name. We can hardly doubt that the one is as well worth studying as the other, Mr. Gear."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The word must be spoken in season and out of season.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish