American theologian and author (1835-1922)
Faith has not lost its power. The soul still enjoys this privilege of receiving inspiration from above. It is not the special prerogative of a few saints. It is the common right of all. It is not an occasional, exceptional gift. It is constant, continuous, the law of our being. It is not a miracle, interfering with the operations of the human soul. It is the condition of our soul's true life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
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Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
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
There are three ways of seeing the Riviera— from the sea, from the carriage road, from the train. We have had a little of all three, enough to make comparison possible; and the view from the sea is incomparably the best. The railroad runs along the coast, under the cliffs and often in tunnels through them; one looks from the Riviera upon the sea, but gets only just enough glimpses up the ravines of the beauty of the coast to be tantalizing. The carriage road runs far up on the cliffs, sometimes on the top of the hills. One looks down on the scene of the beauty, with the sea far below; but the distant snow-capped mountains are hid by the intervening hills on the one side, and the precipitous cliffs and terraced hillsides are too much beneath to be adequately seen upon the other. Perhaps it was because my friends had been on the Riviera looking off, and I had been on the deck of a steamer looking on, that their account gave me no conception of yesterday's stately procession of beauty. I do not expect ever to see another such picture gallery.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Impressions of a Careless Traveler
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
God is our native air. The godless soul gasps out a feeble life in a vacuum. "I will not leave you orphans," saith Christ; "I will come to you." Yet, despite this promise, how many orphaned Christians there are. They are not exactly fatherless. They have a memory of a father in the dim past. They have a hope of a Father in the far future. But now they live without him. They are like travelers in a long and gloomy tunnel. They look back to the days of the patriarchs and prophets. There is light there. They look forward to the revelations of the future life. There is light there. But here and now it is dark.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
God is constantly better than his promise. He does not limit Himself by our expectations.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
An untempted soul may be innocent, but cannot be virtuous, for virtue is the choice of right when wrong presses itself upon us and demands our choosing.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
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
A golden thread, woven into the Old Testament history, renders the various lives whose stories it recounts only different phases of the same experience. That golden thread is faith.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
We think that we have gotten rid of idolatry because we no longer worship painted or carved images, as though these where the only idols.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
There is not that readiness and zeal in the work of the church, which I would wish to see. There are many fruitless branches on the tree, Mrs. Laicus, many members of my church who do nothing really to promote its interests. They are not to be found in the Sabbath School; they cannot be induced to participate actively in tract distribution; and they are even not to be depended on in the devotional week-day meetings of the church.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The spirit which in the modern Church has sometimes sought to found Christian faith on signs and wonders appears to me to be almost as much one of unbelief as the spirit which outside the Church denies the miraculous altogether.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
The sermon was on the words—"Do this in remembrance of me." It was a doctrinal sermon. I am not sure that it might not have been a useful one—in the sixteenth century. It was a sermon against Romanism and Lutheranism and High Church episcopacy. The minister told us what were the various doctrines of the communion. He analyzed them and dismissed them one after another. He showed very conclusively, to us Protestants, that the Romanists are wrong, to us Presbyterians that the Episcopalians are wrong, to us who are open Communionists that the close Communionists are wrong. As there does not happen to be either Romanist, Episcopalian, or close Communionist in our congregation, I cannot say how efficacious his arguments would have been if addressed to any one who was in previous doubt as to his conclusions. Then he proceeded to expound what he termed the rational and Scriptural doctrine of communion. It is, he told us, simply a memorial service. It simply commemorates the past. "As," said he, "every year, the nation gathers to strew flowers upon the graves of its patriot soldiers, so this day the Christian Church gathers to strew with flowers of love and praise the grave of the Captain of our salvation. As in the one act all differences are forgotten, and the nation is one in the sacred presence of death, so in the other, creeds and doctrines vanish, and the Church of Christ appears at the foot of Calvary as one in Christ Jesus."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Solemn faces do not make sacred hours.
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
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
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
God is in all nature; thank God for the scientists, for they are thinking the thoughts of God after him, whether they know it or not.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Personality of God
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 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