American theologian and author (1835-1922)
What we laymen want at the communion service, from our pastors, is chiefly silence. Only a few and simple words; the fewer and simpler the better. Oh! you who are privileged to distribute to us the emblems of Christ's love, believe me that the communion never reaches its highest end, save when you interpret it to us, not merely as a flower-strewn grave of a dead past, but as a Mount of Transfiguration whereon we talk with a living, an ascended Saviour. Believe me too, we want at that table no other message than that which a voice from on high whispers in our hearts: "This is my beloved Son, hear ye him!"
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Was it not at Bunker Hill that the soldiers were directed to reserve their fire till the attacking party had exhausted theirs? That is the way Jennie conducts an argument—when she argues at all, which is very seldom. She accepted every consideration I had offered against uniting with the Wheathedge church, and yet I knew her opinion was not changed; and somehow my own began to waver. I wonder how that method of arguing would work in the court-room. I mean to try it some time.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
It is true that the argument for a Creator from the creation is by modern science modified only to be strengthened. The doctrine of a great First Cause gives place to the doctrine of an Eternal and Perpetual Cause; the carpenter conception of creation to the doctrine of the divine immanence. The Roman notion of a human Jupiter, renamed Jehovah, made to dwell in some bright particular star, and holding telephonic communication with the spheres by means of invisible wires which sometimes fail to work, dies, and the old Hebrew conception of a divinity which inhabiteth eternity, and yet dwells in the heart of the contrite and the humble, takes its place.
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
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
If the impure and the unjust, the drunkard and the licentious, are loathsome to us, what must be the infinite loathing of an infinitely pure Spirit for those who are worldly and selfish, licentious and cruel, ambitious and animal! But with this great loathing is a great pity. And the pity conquers the loathing, appeases it, satisfies it, is reconciled with it, only as it redeems the sinner from his loathsomeness, lifts him up from his degradation, brings him to truth and purity, to love and righteousness; for only thus is he or can he be brought to God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Courage is caution overcome.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Which is worthier, the music or the libretto? It is hard to say. But this is certain, that perfect music often redeems a prosaic libretto.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
I cannot recall that even the supposedly awful temptations of a city life were temptations to us. Our companions were clean companions, our recreations were clean recreations, the plays we went to were clean plays.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
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
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
Each nature requires its own education. The training which will help the man of undue self-esteem, will hurt the man who has too little. A chief end of life is to grow aright; and no man can grow aright.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
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
When a man begins to justify the ways of God to man, he has entered on a very dangerous process.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
Christ is the manifestation of God, not of certain attributes of God or certain phases of his administration. There is no justice to be feared in God that was not manifested in Christ; there is no mercy to attract in Christ that is not eternally in God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
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
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
But there is, nevertheless, an invisible world, which they only see whose eyes the Lord has opened. Science tells us a great deal; but there is a sphere which it is absolutely incompetent to enter; about which, question it as you may, it is absolutely dumb. It can analyze the flower, and tell you all its parts, and describe its wonderful mechanisms and their yet more wonderful operations; but it has neither the eye to discern nor the heart to feel the subtle influence of its divine beauty. It dissects with its keen scalpel the human frame, and tells you the nature and function of every part—what the heart supplies, what the nerves do, how the muscles act. But there is no anatomy possible of the soul; no microscope discloses the nature and the office of reason, imagination, love. The inner life hides itself from the baffled scientist. It needs the prophetic eye to discern the true man within. There are truths which can not be deduced; which are not wrought out with much thought and from much observation; which are incapable of logical demonstration. They are to be known, to be instantly apprehended by the soul upon the mere presentation of them. The musician can not prove that the harmonies of Mendelssohn or Beethoven are grand to one whose soul is not thrilled by them. The practical mill-man, who saw in Niagara nothing but a great waterpower, was simply incapable of appreciating that "grandeur of the Creator's power" which led Audubon to bow before it trembling in silent adoration. Love can not be proved to a mother. The babe on her breast is the only demonstration. Disbelief in love is the evidence of an indurated heart. The man who misanthropically scouts at affection, only witnesses, by his skepticism, his own moral degradation.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
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