American theologian and author (1835-1922)
The experience of personal communication with God is as universal as the human race. Appreciation of the divine presence is more common than appreciation of art, music, or literature. Men and women who do not respond to music, see no beauty in pictures, never read, and could not understand literature if it were read to them, yet find comfort in sorrow, strength in temptation, courage in danger, and added joy in their enjoyments from the sense of a Father's presence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
I do not believe that the laws of nature have ever been violated, for this would be to believe that God who dwells in nature and animates it has violated the laws of his own being.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
My faith in miracles rests also on my faith in Christ -- he himself a greater miracle by far than any attributed to him.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
Father Hyatt is an old, old man. He has long since retired from active service, having worn out his best days here at Wheathedge, in years now long gone by. A little money left him by a parishioner, and a few annual gifts from old friends among his former people, are his means of support. His hair is white as snow. His hands are thin, his body bent, his voice weak, his eyesight dim, his ears but half fulfil their office; his mind even shows signs of the weakness and wanderings of old age; but his heart is young, and I verily believe he looks forward to the hour of his release with hopes as high and expectations as ardent as those with which, in college, he anticipated the hour of his graduation. This was the man, patriarch of the Church, who has lived to see the children he baptized grow up, go forth into the world, many die and be buried; who has baptized the second and even the third generation, and has seen Wheathedge grow from a cross-road to a flourishing village; who this afternoon, perhaps for the last time—I could not help thinking so as I sat in church—interpreted to us the love of Christ as it is uttered to our hearts in this most sacred and hallowed of all services. Very simply, very gently, quite unconsciously, he refuted the cheerless doctrine of the morning sermon, and pointed us to the Protestant doctrine of the Real Presence. Do you ask me what he said? Nothing. It was by his silence that he spoke.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
That ride was one to be remembered. The air was crisp and clear. Just snow enough had fallen in the night to cover every black and noisome thing, as though all nature's sins were washed away by her Sabbath repentance, and she had commenced her life afresh. There was luxury in every inhalation of the pure air. The horse, more impatient than we, could scarcely wait for leave to go, and needed no word thereafter to quicken his flying feet. Down the hill, with merry ringing bells, ever and anon showered with flying snow from the horse's hoof; through the village street with a nod of recognition to Deacon Goodsole, who stood at his door to wave us a cheery recognition; round the corner with a whirl that threatens to deposit us in the soft snow and leave the horse with an empty sleigh; across the bridge, which spans the creek; up, with unabated speed, the little hill on the other side; across the railroad track, with real commiseration for the travelers who are trotting up and down the platform waiting for the train, and must exchange the joyous freedom of this day for the treadmill of the city, this air for that smoke and gas, this clean pure mantle of snow for that fresh accumulation of sooty sloshy filth; pass the school-house, where the gathering scholars stand, snowballs in hand, to see us run merily by, one urchin, more mischievous than the rest, sending a ball whizzing after us; up, up, up the mountain road, for half a mile, past farm-houses whose curling smoke tell of great blazing fires within; past ricks of hay all robed in white, and one ghost of a last summer's scare-crow watching still, though the corn is long since in-gathered and the crows have long since flown to warmer climes; turning off, at last, from the highway into Squire Wheaton's wood road, where, since the last fall of snow, nothing has been before us, save a solitary rabbit whose track our dog Jip follows excitedly, till he is quite out of sight or even call.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Carry your daily affairs to God. Ask his guidance in every emergency. Expect discoveries of his will. Let the promise of his help quicken all your faculties. Act for yourself energetically. Judge for yourself thoughtfully. Look unto God trustingly. Then will God both act and judge for you.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Man, then, is an animal, and has ascended from a lower animal; but he is something immeasurably more than an animal. How did he get this something more? At what stage in his existence was it implanted in him? In what way? On this point the Church has never agreed. Theologians have been divided in opinion into four schools, giving four separate answers to this question. The first is creationism, — the doctrine that into every man, at some stage of his existence, presumptively at the time of his birth, God, by a miraculous or supernatural act, implants the divine spirit. The second is traducianism, — the doctrine that at some period in the history of the human race God breathed the breath of divine life into some remote ancestor, and that the race has inherited that breath of life throughout all subsequent ages. The third is evolutionism, — the doctrine that this higher life of man, this moral, this ethical, this spiritual nature, has been developed by natural processes as the higher physical phases of life have been developed by natural processes. The fourth is conditional immortality, — the doctrine that the spiritual nature is developed and made dominant in men only as by faith they lay hold on God, and that there are men upon the earth who to all intents and purposes are but little higher than the animals, and will sink back into the animal and finally become extinct. Whichever of these views one holds, he may still hold that man is two men. He may think that the divine element is implanted in each individual at birth; or he may think that it was implanted in some individual at a certain point in the race development and has since been inherited by all his posterity; or he may think that it is implanted by a special act of divine grace, not in all individuals, but only in a certain elect circle, — those whom God chooses, or those who choose to accept it; or he may believe that it comes through evolutionary process eventually to all men, growing gradually out of that which is not spiritual; but, whichever theory of its origin he entertains, he may be sure that this spiritual life exists to-day. We have the spiritual life, — the life of conscience, faith, hope, love. On this fact religion is based; it does not depend on the question where this spiritual life came from, or at what point in the development of the race or the individual it began to appear. For religion has to do with what is and what is to be. It leaves science to deal with the past.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
She has not fallen in love. Love has been a flight, not a fall. She has risen into a new life; in her is born a new experience. Perhaps it has come suddenly, with a rush which has overwhelmed her with its tumultuous surprise. Perhaps it has grown gradually, so gradually that she has been quite unconscious of its advent until it has taken complete possession of her. As the water lily bursts open the moment the sun strikes upon it, and the rose turns from bud to blossom so gradually that the closest observation discerns no movement in the petals, so some souls bloom instantly when love touches them with its sunbeam, and others, unconscious and unobserved, pass from girlhood to womanhood. In either case it is love that works the miracle. She has not known the secret of her own heart. Or if she has known it, she cannot tell it to any one else —no, not even to herself! She only knows that within her is a secret room, wherein is a sacred shrine. But she has not the key; and what is enshrined there she will not permit even herself to know. She is a strange contradiction to herself. She is restless away from him and strangely silent in his presence, or breaks the silence only to be still more strangely voluble. She chides herself for not being herself, and has in truth become or is becoming another self. So one could imagine a green shoot beckoned imperiously by the sunlight, and neither daring to emerge from its familiar life beneath the ground nor able to resist the impulse; or a bird irresistibly called by life, and neither daring to break the egg nor able to remain longer in the prison-house of its infancy.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
What has science to offer? This: that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed. No longer an absentee God; no longer a Great First Cause, setting in motion secondary causes which frame the world; no longer a divine mechanic, who has built the world, stored it with forces, launched it upon its course, and now and again interferes with its operation if it goes not right; but one great, eternal, underlying Cause, as truly operative to-day as he was in that first day when the morning stars sang together — every day a creative day. That is the word of science.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
God is infinite and we are finite; and, at the best, we can only know him a very little.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
It was a pretty place. A little cottage, French gray with darker trimmings of the same; the tastiest little porch with a something or other—I know the vine by sight but not to this day by name—creeping over it, and converting it into a bower; another porch fragrant with climbing roses and musical with the twittering of young swallows who had made their nests in little chambers curiously constructed under the eaves and hidden among the sheltering leaves; a green sward sweeping down to the road, with a few grand old forest trees scattered carelessly about as though nature had been the landscape gardner; and prettiest of all, a little boy and girl playing horse upon the gravel walk, and filling the air with shouts of merry laughter—all this combined to make as pretty a picture as one would wish to see. The western sun poured a flood of light upon it through crimson clouds, and a soft glory from the dying day made this little Eden of earth more radiant by a baptism from heaven.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Warm hearts are better than great thoughts.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
As I write there lies before me a letter from my late pastor. He wants to borrow $300 for a few weeks. His Board of Trustees are thus much behind-hand in the first quarter's payment. He has not the means to pay his rent. The duty of the Board in such a case is very evident. The very least they can do is to share in providing temporarily for the exigency. The very most which a mean Board could do would be to ask the minister to unite with them in paying up the deficiency. In fact, he who is least able to do it has to carry it all. Nobody else will trust the church. He has to trust it for hundreds of dollars. And then when his grocer and his landlord and his tailor go unpaid, men shrug their shoulders and say, pityingly, "Oh! he's a minister, he is not trained to business habits." And the world looks on in wonder and in silent contempt to see the Christian Church carrying on its business in a manner the flagrant dishonesty of which would close the doors of any bank, deprive any insurance company of its charter, and drive any broker in Wall street from the Brokers' Board.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Next week I went down to New York and called on the young lady to whom Maurice is engaged. Her home is in New York, or rather it was there; for to my thinking a wife's home is always with her husband; and I never like to hear a wife talking of "going home" as though home could be anywhere else than where her husband and her children are. Maurice and Helen were to be married two weeks from the following Friday, for Maurice proposed to postpone their wedding trip till his next summer's vacation; and Helen, like the dear, sensible girl she is, very readily agreed to that plan. In fact I believe she proposed it. She had some shopping to do before the wedding, and I had some to do on my own account, and we went together. I invented a plan of refurnishing my parlor. I am afraid I told some fibs, or at least came dreadfully near it. I told Helen I wanted her to help me select the carpet; and though she had no time to spare, she was very good-natured, and did spare the time. We ladies had agreed-not without some dissent-to get a Brussels for the parlor, as the cheapest in the end, and I made Helen select her own pattern, without any suspicion of what she was doing, and incidentally got her taste on other carpets, too, so that really she selected them herself without knowing it. Deacon Goodsole recommended me to go for furniture to Mr. Kabbinett, a German friend of his, and Mrs. Goodsole and I found there a very nice parlor set, in green rep, made of imitation rosewood, which he said would wear about as well as the genuine article, and which we both agreed looked nearly as well. We would rather have bought the real rosewood, but that we could not afford. Mr. Kabbinett made us a liberal discount because we were buying for a parsonage. We got an extension table and chairs for the dining-room, (but we had to omit a side-board for the present), and a very pretty oak set for the chamber. We did not buy anything but a carpet for the library, for Mr. Laicus said no one could furnish a student's library for him. He must furnish it for himself.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
All forms of modern skepticism have a common philosophical foundation. Their philosophy denies that we can know any thing except that which we learn through the senses directly, or through conclusions deduced from the senses. We know that there is a sun because we see it; we know approximately its weight and its distance from the earth, because by long processes of reasoning we reach conclusions on those subjects from phenomena which we do see. What we do not thus see, or hear, or touch, or taste, or smell, or thus conclude from what we have seen, or heard, or touched, or tasted, or smelled, is said to belong to the unknown and unknowable. This is the basis of modern skepticism. It is the basis, too, of much of modern theology. It is the secret of the " scientific method." By this method we conclude the existence of an invisible God from the phenomena of life exactly as we conclude the existence of an invisible ether from the phenomena of light. But the God thus deduced is like the ether, only an hypothesis. It is quite legitimate to offer a new hypothesis; and the scientist will be as ready to accept one hypothesis as another, provided it accounts for the phenomena. This philosophy, pursued to its legitimate and logical conclusion, issues in the denial that man is a religious being; or possesses a spiritual nature; or is any thing more than a highly organized and developed animal.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
We think if we can only take the temptation away from men, men will be virtuous. We are mistaken. Men are made virtuous by confronting temptation.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
I did not think it necessary to frighten my cousin by telling her why I came away. When a bullet whizzed by me and flattened itself against the brick wall over my head, I thought it was time for me to retreat, which I did with celerity. This is the nearest I have ever been to a battle, and I have never desired to be any nearer. My military ambition is not ardent.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
I have said that I do not remember ever going into a bar-room or saloon; to that statement I must make one exception. I wanted to know the city from the top to the bottom, its vices as well as its virtues. This desire was partly natural, partly morbid. Defensible or indefensible, it existed. Combining with two or three of my college mates, we hired a policeman to take us through New York. He did the job apparently with thoroughness. He took us into the parlors of one or two houses in Mercer Street, which was then a prostitutes' thoroughfare; then through the Five Points, where no man dared to go by night alone, and even by day went at some hazard; and then to the scene of the worst haunts of the sailors in Water Street. I would not recommend this method of moral vaccination in general, but it was effectual in my case. There has never since that visit been for me any glamour in vice. I had seen it as a critical spectator in all its deformity, and good taste would have kept me from it even if moral principle did not. We did not visit any gambling-house. The interior of a gambling-hell I never saw until many years after, when, with my wife and some other friends, I visited Monte Carlo, where I saw the most unromantic and stupid exhibition of purely sordid avarice my eyes ever beheld.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
This subordination of time and place to comfort and convenience is a part of her quite unconscious and therefore unformulated theory that life is the end and that all household arrangements are means to that end. She therefore believes that things are for folks, not folks for things, and always and instinctively acts on that belief.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
He who looks for the worst in men will not be without belief in a personal devil; he who looks for the best in men will not be without faith in a personal God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God