American theologian and author (1835-1922)
Whatever may be thought of "woman's sphere," it is certain that its boundaries have been steadily enlarged; that an increased liberty, not only of secular employments and civil rights, but also of social intercourse, has been accorded to her with increasing civilization; and that, so far from losing, either in the delicacy and refinement of her own character, or in the chivalric homage paid to her by man, she has gained in both respects in the same ratio in which she has been freed from the trammels of an unnatural conventionalism, and elevated to a position of real equality with the dominant sex.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
New joys usurp the old ones in her life. She did enjoy music; now to her the sweetest songs are the lullabies she sings to her own babe. She did enjoy literature; now the best literature is the stories she reads to her children. No society is to her so delightful as the society which they afford her. Better than any dance she ever shared is it to watch their frolic; the ball-room has no charms that can compete with the nursery. No eloquence thrills her heart as does the language of her children, who speak what is even to their father an unknown tongue.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
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
Let us look at this man a little more closely. He begins in a single cell, and passes through the successive stages of different animals. He is successively reptile, bird, fish, vertebrate mammal, and at last becomes man. I do not speak of the race, but of the individual; he comes into what we call life through these successive stages of previous lives. He is born, dwelling in a body; and we do not need the scientist to tell us his subsequent history. That process we easily trace in three successive stages. First, this body is the necessary means for his development. He is developed by the body. He learns through the eye and the ear, the hand and the foot, the activities of the physical organization. Is he blind, one element of his development is cut off; is he deaf, another element; is he deprived of the sense of touch, a third element. With these all gone some development may be carried on, but, speaking generally, it may be said that the body is necessary to his development. By the very discipline he receives through his body his soul is moulded and shaped. He is educated through the physical organization. Then he comes into the second stage, in which this body becomes the necessary instrument of his activity. It is the power by which he operates on the world without. His lungs, his heart, his stomach, keep the machine in order, while the machine is being used to impart to other lives. Because he has hands which are themselves tools, he makes tools, as no handless animal can. Because he has eyes, he can produce color, which otherwise he could not produce. With his tongue he speaks, and communicates his thoughts to others. With his pen he writes, and communicates his life to other lives. His body is the necessary instrument of his activity, — this is the second stage. Finally, in old age, he comes into the third stage, in which the body becomes a hindrance to his development. He still has the same power to perceive truth that he always had, but he has become deaf and cannot hear. He has the same artistic sense that he always had, but he has become blind and cannot see. He has the same burning thoughts with which he was wont to inspire audiences, but his voice has lost its music and its power; he cannot reach the audience. He is still a musician, and the music is in his soul, but the voice is gone; we want to hear him sing no more. His very brain ceases to formulate thought. His soul has outgrown the body. First it was the instrument for development; second, an instrument for usefulness; now it is neither. He has not grown old, but the organ that he used has grown old. Gladstone is not old. Put him in a new body, — what a magnificent statesman he would be! Henry Ward Beecher was not old. Bring him back and put him in a body forty years old, — how his eloquence would again stir the heart of the nation! Men do not grow old; it is the body which grows old, unable to fulfill its function as the servant of the spirit.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
If you and I have not seen God, we cannot bear witness to God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
I have feelings, but my pen cannot and will not write feelings; nay, my heart has no mind that can coin them into words.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
God is in all nature; thank God for the scientists, for they are thinking the thoughts of God after him, whether they know it or not.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Personality of God
An untempted soul may be innocent, but cannot be virtuous, for virtue is the choice of right when wrong presses itself upon us and demands our choosing.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
A Miracle — that is, an extraordinary event arresting attention and awakening wonder, accomplishing some beneficent work, and by its manifestation of a superhuman power serving as a sign of a divine message or messenger — may either be in accordance with human experience or may transcend human experience. The first is as truly a miracle as the second; what constitutes it a miracle is not that it is an event out of the ordinary course of nature, but that it serves effectually as a sign of superhuman power in the accomplishment of a moral end. The two greatest miracles of the Old Testament are not events transcending human experience; they were wrought by what we customarily call natural forces, and in accordance with what we call natural laws. What made them miracles was such an evident connection with a moral end that they served as signs of the directing presence of a moral Person, possessing superhuman power. The first of these miracles was the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the second the passage of the Red Sea by the children of Israel.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
A man is no less a person because he can speak in New York and be heard in Chicago, or press a button in Washington and set machinery in motion in Omaha. Extension of power does not lessen the personality of him who exercises it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
"The Psalms of David have supplied the Christian church with its best psalmody for nearly three thousand years," continued I. "They constitute the reservoir from which Luther, and Watts, and Wesley, and Doddridge, and a host of other singers have drawn their inspiration, and in which myriads untold have found the expression of their highest and holiest experiences, myriads who never heard of Homer. They are surely as well worth studying as his noble epics."
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
There are three ways of seeing the Riviera— from the sea, from the carriage road, from the train. We have had a little of all three, enough to make comparison possible; and the view from the sea is incomparably the best. The railroad runs along the coast, under the cliffs and often in tunnels through them; one looks from the Riviera upon the sea, but gets only just enough glimpses up the ravines of the beauty of the coast to be tantalizing. The carriage road runs far up on the cliffs, sometimes on the top of the hills. One looks down on the scene of the beauty, with the sea far below; but the distant snow-capped mountains are hid by the intervening hills on the one side, and the precipitous cliffs and terraced hillsides are too much beneath to be adequately seen upon the other. Perhaps it was because my friends had been on the Riviera looking off, and I had been on the deck of a steamer looking on, that their account gave me no conception of yesterday's stately procession of beauty. I do not expect ever to see another such picture gallery.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Impressions of a Careless Traveler
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
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
Temperance is not one of the virtues for which Wheathedge is, or ought to be, famous. I know not where you will find cooler springs of more delicious water, than gush from its mountain sides. I know not where you will find grapes for home wine-that modern recipe for drunkenness-more abundant or more admirably adapted to the vintner's purpose. But the springs have few customers, and one man easily makes all the domestic wine which the inhabitants of Wheathedge consume. But at the landing there are at least four grog-shops which give every indication of doing a thriving business, beside Poole's, half-way to the Mill village; to say nothing of the bar the busiest room by all odds, at Guzzem's hotel, busiest, alas! on the Sabbath day.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
If I had only life's book to read ... I should not believe in a God of love. I should turn Persian, and believe in two gods, one of love and good-will, one of hate and malice.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
I believe that God is the Great Companion, that we are not left orphans, that we may have comradeship with him.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion
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
A graceful and blessed old age must have three elements in it: a happy retrospect, a peaceful present, and an inspiring future. And old age cannot have either one of these three if the youth has been wasted and manhood has been misspent.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
"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