American theologian and author (1835-1922)
Revelation is unveiling. It is the disclosure of some truth not known before. There may be inspiration without revelation; there may be revelation without inspiration. One may be inspired and yet get no new view of truth; one may get a new view of truth and not be inspired. For the truth may not be inspiring. It may be, indeed, the reverse, — it may be depressing. Inspiration, then, is the influence of one spirit — and especially of the Divine Spirit — upon other spirits. Revelation is the unveiling of truth before not disclosed. To a considerable extent, the Church formerly believed in revelation other than through inspiration. The Christian evolutionist believes in revelation only through inspiration. A simple illustration will perhaps make this clear.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Perhaps we expect time to work for us, when time is only given us that we may work.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Of course, we must trim the Sunday school-room as well as the Church, for the children must have their Christmas; and trimmed it was, so luxuriantly that it seemed as though the woods had laid siege to and taken possession of the sanctuary, and that nature was preparing to join on this glad day her voice with that of man in singing praise to Him who brings life to a winter-wrapped earth, and whose fittest symbol, therefore, is the tree whose greenness not even the frosts of the coldest winter have power to diminish.
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
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
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
What is God's way of doing things, according to evolution? It is to develop life by successive processes, until a spirit akin to His appears in a bodily organism akin to that of the lower animals from which it has been previously evolved. This bodily organism is from birth in a state of constant decay and repair. At length the time comes when, through disease or old age, the repair no longer keeps pace with the decay. Then the body returns to the earth, and the spirit to God who gave it. This disembodying of the spirit we call death. There is at death an end of the body. It knows no resurrection save in grass and flowers. The resurrection, the anastasis or up-standing as the New Testament calls it, is the resurrection of the spirit. The phrase "resurrection of the body" never occurs in the New Testament. But every death is a resurrection of the spirit. What we call death the New Testament calls an "exodus" or an emancipation from bondage, an "unmooring " or setting the ship free from its imprisonment.1 The spirit is released from its confinement, and this release is death. Death is, in short, not a cessation of existence, not a break in existence; it is simply what Socrates declared it to be, "the separation of the soul and body. And being dead is the attainment of this separation; when the soul exists in herself, and is parted from the body, and the body is parted from the soul, — that is death."
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
There are modern writers on law that may be as valuable as Moses; there are poems of Browning and Tennyson and our own Whittier that are far more pervaded with the Christlike spirit than some on the Hebrew Psalmody. But there is no life like the life of Christ.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
The most beautiful statue that Powers ever chiseled does not compare for grace and beauty with the Divine model. The same mystic element of life is wanting.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
That is the best sermon, not which is a great pulpit effort, but which is helpful. If, young men, you have preached a sermon and some one comes up to you and says that was a great pulpit effort, hide your head in shame and go home and never write another like it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
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
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
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
Oh! fools and blind, not to know the Master whose servant nature is.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
It is not possible even to state the doctrine of an atheistic creation without using the language of theism in the statement.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
Besides looking at the house we asked the usual house-hunting questions. Mr. Sinclair was in the city. He wanted to sell because he was going to Europe in the spring to educate his children. He would sell his place for $10,000 or rent it for $800. For the summer? No! for the year. He did not care to rent it for the summer, nor to give possession before fall. Would he rent the furniture? Yes, if one wanted it. But that would be extra. How much land was there? About two acres. Any fruit? Pears, peaches, and the smaller fruits—strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Whereupon Jennie and I bowed ourselves out and went away.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Jesus Christ did not come into the world merely to be a spectacle, merely to show us who and what God is, and then depart and leave us where we were before. "I am the door," He says. A door is to push open and go through. He is the door; through Him God enters into humanity. He is the door; through Him humanity enters into God. He has come into the world in order that we, coming to some knowledge and apprehension of the divine nature, coming to understand what divine justice, divine truth, divine life, divine purity, divine love are, may the better enter into that life and be ourselves filled with all the fullness of God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
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
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