American theologian and author (1835-1922)
When I first came to Wheathedge the Calvary Presbyterian church was externally, to the passer-by, distinguished chiefly for the severe simplicity of its architecture, and the plainness, not to say the homeliness, of its surroundings. It is a long, narrow, wooden structure, as destitute of ornament as Squire Line's old fashioned barn. Its only approximation to architectural display is a square tower surmounted by four tooth-picks pointing heavenward, and encasing the bell. A singular, a mysterious bell that was and is. It expresses all the emotions of the neighborhood. It passes through all the moods and inflections of a hundred hearts. To-day it rings out with soft and sacred tones its call to worship. To-morrow from its watch-tower it sees the crackling flame in some neighboring barn or tenement, and utters, with loud and hurried and anxious voice, its alarm. Anon, heavy with grief, it seems to enter, as a sympathising friend, into the very heart experiences of bereaved and weeping mourners. And when the rolling year brings round Independence day, all the fluctuations of feeling which mature and soften others are forgotten, and it trembles with the excitement of the occasion, and laughs, and shouts, and capers merrily in its homely belfry, as though it were a boy again.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Among the names which redeem human nature from the dark pall of sin and shame which envelops the race, and give a true interpretation to the divine declaration that God made man in his own image, none is more illustrious than that of Moses. His name is brightest of all the stars that illumine the dark night which, from the days of the Garden of Eden to those of the Garden of Gethsemane, settled over the earth. Notwithstanding the lapse of three thousand years, it is still undimmed by time, which effaces so much that seems to its own age to be glorious, and buries in oblivion so much that is really ignominious. The founder of a great nation, his name will be held in lasting remembrance so long as the promise of God holds good, and the Hebrew race preserves, though scattered to the four quarters of the earth, its sacred records and its national identity. The founder, under God, of those principles of political economy which underlie every free state, his name will be more and more honored as those principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, which were the foundation of the Hebrew commonwealth, are more generally recognized and adopted by the voice of mankind. More resplendent even than his inspired genius are that moral courage, that indomitable and unselfish purpose, and that manly yet humble piety, which are far too seldom united to a tenacious ambition and a powerful intellect. Deservedly honored as the greatest of all statesmen, he is yet more to be honored for those sentiments of commingled patriotism and piety, which lead him to reject a life of apparent glory, though real disgrace, for one of seeming ignominy, but real and undying glory.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
It is hardly necessary to point out the function or dwell upon the necessity of conscience in human life. It is fundamental to all that is human in life. Without it men would be brutes; society would be wholly predatory; the only law recognized would be the law of the strongest; the only restraint on cupidity would be self-interest. There could be neither justice nor freedom. Trade would be a perpetual attempt at the spoliation of one's neighbor. Law could be enforced only by fear, and government would be of necessity a despotism. The higher faculties uninfluenced by conscience would rapidly degenerate. Reverence would no longer be paid to the good and the true, but only to the strong and the terrible; religion would become a superstition; God a demon ruling by fear, not by law; punishment a torment inflicted by hate and wrath, not a penalty sanctioned by conscience for disregard of its just and necessary laws; and benevolence itself, unregulated by a sense of right and wrong, would become a mere sentiment, following with its tears the robber as readily as the Messiah to his crucifixion, and strewing its flowers as lavishly on the grave of the felon as on that of the martyr. In history have been seen all these exhibitions, not of the absolute elimination of conscience from human life, for conscience has never been wholly wanting in the most degraded epoch of the most degraded nation, but of its obscuration and its effeminacy.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
It is true that even to the heathen death did not end all. They believed in something after death, but they knew not what--a vague, shadowy, unsatisfactory immortality.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Other Room
Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. Belief in the reality of religion involves belief that God is, and that He stands in some personal relation to man. But it is not an opinion respecting God, nor an opinion respecting His influence in the world of men. It is a personal consciousness of God. It is a human experience, but an experience of relationship with One who transcends humanity. The creed is not religion; the creed is a statement of what certain men think about religion. Worship is not religion; worship is a method of expressing religion. The church is not religion; the church is an organization of men and women, formed for the purpose of promoting religion. Religion precedes creeds, worship, church; that is, the life precedes men's thoughts about the life, men's expression of the life, men's organizations formed to promote the life. Religion may be personal or social; that is, it may be the consciousness of God in the individual soul, or it may be the concurrent consciousness of God in a great number of individuals, producing a social or communal life. In either case it is a life, not an opinion about life. It is not a definition of God, it is fellowship with Him; not a definition of sin, but sorrow because of sin; not a definition of forgiveness, but relief from remorse; not a definition of redemption, but a new and divine life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
The forgiveness of sins is, in my thinking of it, no longer an exceptional, episodical manifestation of a supernatural grace; it is the revelation and effect of the habit of mind of the Eternal Father toward all his children. The laws of forgiveness are a part of the laws of the Almighty and the All-gracious. It is said that the violation of natural law is never forgiven. It is said that if you put your finger in the candle, it will burn, pray as you will, and if you fall from your horse, you will break a bone, however pious you may be; whether the bone breaks or not depends, not upon your piety, but upon your age. Is it indeed true that there is no forgiveness in natural law? What a strange-looking audience this would be if there were none. The boy cuts his finger and nature begins to heal it; he breaks his arm — nature begins to knit the bone; he burns his finger — nature provides a new skin. Nature, that is, God, implants in man himself the help-giving powers that remove disease; and, in addition, stores the world full of remedies also, so that specifics may be found for almost every disease to which flesh is heir. The laws of healing are wrought into the physical realm; they are a part of the divine economy; and shall we think that He who helps the man to a new skin and to a new bone cares nothing for his moral nature, and will not help him when he has fallen into sin?
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
The mother who tries to keep her child away from all temptation simply prepares the boy for a terrible fall when he gets old enough to leave the home. It is not by taking away the bonds, it is by giving strength to the man that he may break the bonds, that he is redeemed. Every man is like a Samson bound by his enemies, and he must acquire the strength within himself to break them.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
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
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
Jesus Christ is not a manifestation of certain attributes or qualities of God; he is God manifest in the flesh. He is not a temporary manifestation of God's mercy or pity, leaving his justice and his anger to be revealed in the future. There is no justice and no wrath in God which is not manifested in Jesus Christ; and there is no pity and no mercy in Jesus Christ which is not a reflection of the eternal pity and mercy of God. "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." To understand Jesus Christ is to understand God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
We are not, however, to judge of a truth beforehand by the fruit which we think it will produce. It is the truth which makes free, not any kind of error. It is the truth which sanctifies men, not any kind of falsehood. All truth is safe. All error is dangerous. It is only the truth that the minister is to use. He is never to say, "This is the philosophy that my people are used to and this is the philosophy that I think will do better service, and so, though I do not believe it, I will preach it." Never! It is only the truth he is to use, but he is always to use the truth. Truth is always an instrument.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
"I don't believe the Bible is the Word of God. I can't believe it. I don't believe the laws of Moses are any more inspired than the laws of Solon, or the books of Samuel and Kings than the history of Tacitus, or the Psalms of David than the Paradise Lost of Milton, or—you'll think me bold indeed to say so Mr. Laicus," (he was cooler now and spoke more slowly), "the words of Jesus, than the precepts of Confucius or the dialogues of Plato."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
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
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
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
Life proceeds from life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Men who do want God, who are really in earnest to find God, who do not live in the outward world altogether, but have some vision of the inner, who do not stop at the creed or the church or the Book, who do not call God to an account for the way in which he conducts himself, still fail to find God because they want God only for what God will bring to them.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
No man will find God unless he seeks after God for God's own sake, loves him for himself, and not for the gifts which he may bestow.
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
Who would not chose to have been one of God's three hundred? But when he brings us to the Spring of Trembling, how rarely we covet the post of honor. How we shrink from the battle of the present, even while we honor the heroism that courted it in the past. Every era has its battle. God's trumpet calls to-day, as Gideon's did, for recruits. Enter the ranks.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths