American theologian and author (1835-1922)
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
It is late in the fall. The summer birds have fled southward. The summer residents have fled to their city homes. The mountains have blossomed out in all the brilliance of their autumnal colors; but the transitory glory has gone and they are brown and bare. One little flurry of snow has given us warning of what is coming. The furnace has been put in order; the double windows have been put on; a storm-house has enclosed our porch; a great pile of wood lies up against the stable, giving my boy promise of plenty of exercise during the long winter. And still the summer lingers in these bright and glorious autumnal days. And of them the carpenters and the painters are making much in their work on the new library-hall.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
My God is in the hearts of those that seek Him ... And in my heart I carry an assurance of His love that life cannot disturb. I know His love as the babe knows its mother's love, lying upon her breast. It knows her love though it neither understands her nature nor her ways.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The combination of old and new makes Genoa a city of curious contrasts. Driving through the city, we passed along broad avenues cut through old portions of the city, the hills cut down—for Genoa is built on hills—the valleys filled up, old houses being demolished, new houses going up. We drove in five minutes from new Genoa to old Genoa, and were in streets so narrow that the residents of the upper stories might almost shake hands across the street, and easily can, and I suspect do, carry on gossip with one another; streets bounded by tenements six, eight, or even ten stories in height, the walls ornamented with ancient frescoes, peeping at us from between the articles of the week's wash hung in graceful festoons from the windows like decorations for a festal day. Now we were in a lane so narrow that there was scarce room for our carriage, which must drive on a walk lest it run over some of the children that swarm out of the crowded tenement; now in an avenue so broad as to give abundant room to the trolley line in the center of the avenue without discommoding the carriages; now we were looking up between the tenements at a narrow strip of blue sky overhead, as we might look up from the bottom of a sunless canon in Colorado; now we were looking off from a plaza on the brow of one of the encircling hills upon the city below and the harbor around which the city clusters; now we had as street companions half - dressed children and hard, weary - faced women, with colored kerchiefs for head-gear, and short skirts and sometimes ragged and dirty ones; now we had fine ladies reclining at ease in luxurious carriages as they who had never known either work or care, and theatrically appareled nurses with babies as much overdressed in their fluffy garments as their infantile brothers in the poorer quarters were underdressed in their rags and tatters. And yet in it all a certain picturesqueness of color, and, to the stranger, oddity of fashion, which went far to redeem the one aspect from mere ostentation and the other from mere squalor.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Impressions of a Careless Traveler
There are some metaphysical and abstract arguments for the opinion that the mind, the I within, that controls the body, what the Germans call the ego—which is Latin for I—is simple, not complex; that is, one power operating in different ways and doing different things. I am myself inclined to think that the better opinion; but it is not necessary here to go into this question at all, for what we are going to study is not the mind itself, but human nature, that is, the operations of the mind. And there is no doubt that the operations of the mind are complex. There may be, I am inclined to think there is, but one power, which perceives and thinks and feels and wills; but perceiving and thinking and feeling and willing are very different actions, and it is only with the actions that we have to do.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
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
Theology is the science of religion. It is the result of an attempt made by men to state in an orderly and systematic manner the facts respecting the life of God in the soul of man. It involves intellectual definition of the various forms of consciousness which constitute the religious life. Its relation to religion is the relation of other sciences to the vital phenomena which they endeavor to explain. With the growth of the human intellect there comes a wiser study of life, a better understanding of it, a new definition of its terms, and a new classification of its phenomena. The life does not change, but man's understanding of it changes. There is a new astronomy, though the stars are old; a new botany, though vegetable life is unchanged; a new chemistry, though the constituent elements of the universe are the same. So there is a new theology, though not a new religion. God, sin, repentance, forgiveness, love, remain essentially unchanged, but the definitions of God, sin, repentance, forgiveness, and love are changed from generation to generation. There is as little danger of undermining religion by new definitions of theology as there is of blotting out the stars from the heavens by a new astronomy. But as religion is the life of God in the soul of man, definitions which give to man a clearer and a more intelligible understanding of that life will promote it, and definitions which are, or seem to be, irrational, will tend to impede or impair it. To this extent theology affects the religious life as other sciences do not affect the life with which they have to deal.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
The Bible is not one homogeneous book, but a collection of literature, gathered out of a much larger range of literature, and embodying the history of the growth of the consciousness of God in one people, preeminent among the peoples of their time for the perception of God. It is the sifted utterances of the chosen prophets of a peculiar people, peculiar in their spiritual genius. It is inspired, because the lives of the men and the hearts of the writers were lifted above the common errors and prejudices of their time; not because they were wholly freed from human prejudice and misconception. It contains a revelation of God; but the revelation is one in human experience, and subject to the adumbrations of human experience.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
So the end draws daily nearer, and no one guesses it except herself. Her life is not ebbing away, it is at its flood. She has trained herself in the habit of immortality, the habit of looking, not at the things which are seen and are transitory, but at the things which are not seen and are eternal. Her anticipatory ambitions for her children and her grandchildren are boundless, and the hopes for herself which made radiant the dawn of her life seem dim beside the higher hopes for her loved ones which fill life's eventide with sunshine. Her husband and herself are lovers still; the honeymoon has never set, never even waned; and to his love is added that of those whom God has given to her. She thinks to live naturally is the best preparation for dying peacefully; rarely, therefore, does she allow herself to forecast the coming day. When she does, not with dread but with a solemn gladness she looks forward to emancipation from the irksome bonds of the fettering body and to embarkation for that unknown continent where many colonists are already gathered to give her greeting. Faith, hope, love — these are life. And her faith was never so clear, for her heart was never so pure; her hopes were never so great, for experience has enlarged them; and her love was never so rich, for God, who is love, has been her life Companion.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
It is true that wisdom has wealth in the one hand and pleasure in the other, that her ways are ways of pleasantness, her paths are paths of peace; but she will never come to one who follows her for the sake of the wealth in the one hand or the pleasure in the other.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Gradually my whole conception of the relation of God to the universe has changed. I am sure that I have not lost my experience of God. I am far more certain now than I was forty years ago that God is, and that God is not an absentee God. I am not quite so certain as I once was about some of the manifestations which I once thought he had made of himself. I am a great deal more certain than I once was of his personal relation to me. My experience of God has changed only to grow deeper, broader, and stronger. But my conception of God's relation to the universe has changed radically. My hypothesis was — God an engineer who had made an engine and sat apart from it, ruling it; God a king who had made the human race and sat apart from men, ruling them. That was my hypothesis; now I have another hypothesis. And I think the change which has come over my mind is coming and has come over the minds of a great many. I think that there is nothing original in what I am going to say to you this morning, for I am only going to interpret to you a change, perhaps not altogether understood, which is being wrought in the mind of the whole Christian Church. I think my change only reflects your change. But whether that be true or not, I am sure the change has taken place in me.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
Every one went to church — every one with the exception of two or three families whom I looked upon with a kind of mysterious awe, as I might have looked upon a family without visible means of support and popularly suspected of earning a livelihood by counterfeiting or some similar lawless practice. The church itself was an old-fashioned brick Puritan meeting-house, equally free from architectural ornament without and from decoration within. The pews had been painted white; for some reason the paint had not dried, and the congregation, to protect their garments, had spread down upon the seats and backs of the pews newspapers, generally religious. When the paint at length dried the newspapers were pulled off, leaving the impression of their type reversed, and I used to interest myself during the long sermon in trying to decipher the hieroglyphic impressions. There was neither Sunday-School room nor prayer-meeting room. The Sunday-School was held in the church, and the parson at prayer-meeting took a seat in a pew about the center of the building, put a board across the back of the pews to hold his Bible and his lamp, and sat, except when speaking, with his back to the congregation. A great wood stove at the rear, with a smoke-pipe extending the whole length of the room to the flue in front, furnished the heat — none too much of it on cold winter days. Plain and even homely as was this meeting-house, associations have given to it a sacredness in my eyes which neither Gothic arch nor pictured window could have given to it. My grandfather was largely instrumental in constructing it. In its pulpit each of his five sons preached on occasions. One of them acted as its pastor for a year or more. A grandson and a great-grandson of his were here baptized. My earliest recollections of public worship and of Sunday-School teaching are associated with it. We four brothers have each at times played the organ in connection with its service of sacred song. My brother Edward and myself were both ordained to the Gospel ministry within its walls, and in its pulpit preached some of our first sermons. The church still exists, a flourishing organization, but the meeting-house was destroyed by fire in 1886, and its place has been taken by a more modern structure.
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
It is a shame for a man to be a millionaire in possessions if he is not also a millionaire in beneficence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
Never say you are too old. You do not say it now, perhaps; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the eyes grow dim and the young despair comes to curse the old age, you will say, "It is too late for me." Never too late! Never too old! How old are you--thirty, fifty, eighty? What is that in immortality? We are but children.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
Of self-sacrifice the Cross is the sublimest of all illustrations. It has cost God something to love.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Oh! fools and blind, not to know the Master whose servant nature is.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
God conducts all his campaigns upon analogous principles. The emancipation of mankind is always wrought out by a forlorn hope. God is not on the side of the strong battalions. In moral conflicts, at least, numbers never count. Only the few have faith in God and courage in his cause; and faith and courage alone gain the battle.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
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