American theologian and author (1835-1922)
I always went to church. Of my religious experience I shall speak hereafter, tracing it through the various stages of its growth from boyhood to old age. Enough to say here that I cannot share the belief of those who think, or perhaps I should say feel, that the church has degenerated in the last half-century. During a part of that time I attended the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church. Some forty or fifty boys and girls from an orphan asylum made what seemed to me an important part of the congregation. The boys sat in one gallery, the girls in the gallery opposite. I do not recall that I ever heard the minister tell a story, use an illustration, or point a moral lesson which by any possibility could appeal to these children. There may have been connected with this church some mission chapel, but I do not think so. If so, it was not in evidence. I do not think I ever heard of one. The attitude of the churches in New York City was then much what the attitude of the village church is to-day: its duty was to care for the individuals and the families in its own congregation. For these attendants there were plenty of services — not to say a surplus; but going out into the world preaching the Gospel to every creature was left to be done by the missionary societies, which were supported by the churches with more or less liberality. Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and some time later Dr. W. S. Rainsford in New York, were pioneers in church missionary work. It hardly need be said that there was no social settlement work and no Young Women's Christian Association; the Young Men's Christian Association was just coming into existence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
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Reminiscences
We never appreciated our dominie aright till now. But now no one can praise him too highly. The cause of this his sudden rise in public estimation is a very simple one. He has been called to a New York City parish. And he has accepted the call. This is a curious world, and the most curious part of it is the Church. While he stayed we grumbled at him. Now he leaves we grumble because he is going.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The street-walkers were much more in evidence then than they are to-day; or is it only that they were more in evidence to a youth under seventeen than they are to a man over seventy? I do not think that is all. That I should not be accosted now as I often was then is natural enough; but I have eyes to see and some common sense to judge whether the women I see upon the broad and well-lighted streets between eleven and twelve o'clock are professionals or not. The upper gallery in most, if not all, of the theaters was reserved for such women, where they might ply their trade, and no woman was allowed on the floor or in the first gallery of most theaters unless accompanied by a man as a guarantee of her respectability.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
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
In all ages of the world the use of physical organs by the mind and spirit has been recognized, not only by the philosophers, but also by the common people. The ancient Hebrews put the seat of the emotions in the bowels; hence the phrase, " bowels of mercies," as used in Scripture. This was probably because strong emotion affects the bowels. Later, for an analogous reason, because of the effect of strong feeling on the heart and circulating system, common language fixed upon the heart as the seat of the emotions. This notion still lingers in such phrases as " a warm-hearted friend," "a good-hearted fellow." But it is now well established that the real seat of both the affections and the intellect is in the brain. By this is not meant that they are located in the brain. They have no location; they are omnipresent in the body, as God is omnipresent in the universe, equally controlling all its parts. It is more accurate, therefore, to say that it is now well established that the material or physical organ of all thought and feeling is in the brain; that every mental and emotional activity employs some part of the brain; that every such activity uses up some brain tissue, requiring, therefore, a new supply; and that, therefore, the healthful action of the mind requires a good brain, and the best action of the mind requires good digestion and good circulation, since on these depend the renewal and replenishing of the brain.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
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
Evolution is described by John Fiske as "God's way of doing things." Theology also may be described as an attempt to explain God's way of doing things. Thus, to a certain extent the science of evolution and the science of theology have the same ultimate end. Both attempt to furnish an orderly, rational, and self-consistent account of phenomena. The supposed inconsistency between science and religion is really an inconsistency between two sciences. The theologian and the scientist have given different, and to some extent inconsistent, accounts of God's way of doing things. It is important for us to know which account is correct. It is even religiously desirable that we should know, since our understanding of God's influence upon the human soul affects that influence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Immortality does not seem to me to be capable of scientific demonstration. If by immortality we simply mean that those who seem to have died continue to live after death, ghosts, slates, table-tippings, rappings, and such like might, perhaps, afford a scientific demonstration of this not very important fact. But if immortality means a life in the other world that transcends any life in this, a life far beyond any experience here below, a life free from the trammels of the body, a life glorious beyond all imaginings, it is impossible that it should be demonstrated. For such a life lies in the future, and science has to do exclusively with the present and the past. It may anticipate the future, but it can test only what actually is. All that science can do respecting immortality is to look at life from the evolutionary point of view and see what evolution would naturally lead us to anticipate in the future, — death or life. And it appears to me that belief in evolution, so far from weakening faith in immortality, strengthens it, and I might almost say necessitates it. It does not demonstrate immortality, and yet I do not see how one can be a consistent evolutionist and think that "death ends all."
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 now conceive of God as in his universe. I conceive of creation as a growth. I conceive of him as making the universe somewhat as our spirit makes our body, shaping and changing and developing it by processes from within. The figures from the finite to the infinite are imperfect and misleading, but this is the figure which best represents to me my own thought of God's relation to the universe: Not that of an engineer who said one morning, " Go to, I will make a world," and in six days, or six thousand years, or six million thousand years, made one by forming it from without, as a potter forms the clay with skilful hand; but that of a Spirit who has been forever manifesting himself in the works of creation and beneficence in all the universe, one little work of whose wisdom and beneficence we are and we see.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Let us get rid of this notion that we must always associate the thoughts of God with a spirit of great solemnity. Gayety and God are not mutually exclusive.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
God is always revealing himself, and has always been revealing himself. He has always been knocking at the door; he has always been standing at the window. He has always been showing his character. They who have seen it best and most clearly, and had power to tell us what they have seen, are the world's prophets. What is distinctive in respect to Hebrew law is not its universal applicability to the human race — there is a great deal in the Hebrew law to which we no longer pay any attention; it is the recognition of the fact that God is the great lawgiver. What is peculiar in the Hebrew history is not its narration of great battles, great statesmen's endeavors and achievements; it is the history of the dealing of God with a particular people. God is as truly with the American race as he ever was with the Hebrew race; as truly with Abraham Lincoln as he was with Moses. The difference between the Hebrew race and the American race is the difference between the Old Testament Scriptures and the modern newspaper. The modern newspaper is enterprising, and it gathers news, and gathers gossip that is not news, from the four quarters of the globe; but it fails to see God in human history. The Old Testament prophets did not show the same enterprise, did not have the same wideness of view; but they did see God in human history, and have helped us to see him. That vision of God is equally characteristic of the fiction of the Bible — Ruth, Esther, Jonah, the parable of the prodigal son (there are some people who think it is irreverent to suggest that there is any fiction in the Old Testament, but quite right to find it in the words of Christ in the New), and of the drama of the Bible — the epic drama of Job, the love drama of the Song of Songs. In these is seen a manifestation, a revelation of goodness and truth and righteousness, and, above all, of a personal God dealing with men. This is the characteristic of the Hebrew poetry. We find more beautiful phrasing in Wordsworth, or in Tennyson, or in Longfellow, or in Whittier, but nowhere do you find in literature, ancient or modern, such discoveries of God as in the Hebrew Psalter. The "Eternal Goodness" may seem to you more beautiful than the One Hundred and Third Psalm; but would Whittier have written " Eternal Goodness" if he had not read the One Hundred and Third Psalm?
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
My wife is a diplomate. If ever I am president of the United States—which may Heaven forbid,—she shall be secretary of State. She never argues; but she always carries her point.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
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
Jesus Christ did not manifest all the qualities of God. There is greater manifestation of power in the earthquake and the tornado than was manifested in the stilling of the tempest; greater mechanical skill manifested in the flower than in anything that Christ wrought; greater affluence of beneficence in every annual harvest than in the feeding of five thousand. But the love, the patience, the fidelity, the truth, the long-suffering, the heart of the Infinite and Eternal Energy, comes to its fruition and its manifestation in this one incomparable life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
What has made the Church of Christ what it is to-day? Our struggles? Did we face the persecutions of Nero? Did we flee from the persecuting hordes in the Waldensian valleys? Did we fight the battles with the Duke of Alva on the plains of Netherlands? Did we struggle with hierarchical despotism at Worcester and at Naseby? Did we face the cold and the suffering of New England? Others have struggled for us, and we have taken the fruit of their struggles; and if our posterity are to have a nation worthy of their possession, it will be because in us there is also some hand-to-hand wrestling, some self-denial, some struggle with the forces of corruption and evil in our own time. This is the great general law which Paul has expressed in the declaration, "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now." Vicarious sacrifice is not an episode. It is the universal law of life. Life comes only from life. This is the first proposition. Life-giving costs the life-giver something. That is the second proposition. Pain is travail-pain, birth-pain; and it is a part of the divine order -- that is, of the order of nature -- that the birth of a higher life should always be through the pain of another.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
Before Christ brought life and immortality to light, death was the slayer of man's hopes. It left love alive, but love without hope is poignant sorrow.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Other Room
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 theology and the science of the past have agreed in assuming what I think the theology and the science of the future will agree in denying, that God sits apart from nature, and that there are natural forces and natural laws which operate independently of Him. Starting from this assumption, of course theology has resisted bitterly every attempt to lessen the number of interventions in the order of nature, because the inevitable result was to lessen the evidence of a Divine presence in the world. Nevertheless, both the religious and the scientific world have come to believe in a greatly lessened number of interventions, until now science has reached with practical unanimity these three conclusions: first, there is but one force, manifesting itself in different forms; second, that this force is never increased or diminished in amount, only varied in form; and third, that this force, if we believe it to be directed to intelligent ends, is sufficient to account for all the phenomena of nature and life, so that there is no reason to believe in any interventions from without. I believe that the theology of the future will frankly and gladly accept these conclusions, instead of resisting them and endeavoring to discover some evidences of interventions constantly lessening in number if not in magnitude. It, too, will affirm that there is only one force, the "Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed." It will affirm that this Infinite and Eternal Energy is never increased or diminished; that, in other words, God, who varies infinitely in His manifestations, varies in no whit in His real life. It will affirm that there are and can be no interventions in this resident force, this Infinite and Eternal Energy, for if there were there would be a second God, superior to the God who resides in the universe and controlling Him.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist