American theologian and author (1835-1922)
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
Our Bible class at the Mill has prospered greatly. Mr. Gear was better than his word. The first Sabbath he brought in over a dozen of his young men; the half dozen who were already in the Sabbath School joined us of course. Others have followed. Some of the children of the Mill village gathered curiously about the school-house door from Sunday to Sunday. It occurred to me that we might do something with them. I proposed it to Mr. Gear. He assented. So we invited them in, got a few discarded singing books from the Wheathedge Sabbath-school, and used music as an invitation to more. Mrs. Gear has come in to teach them. There are not over a dozen or twenty all told as yet. If the skating or the sliding is good they are reduced to five or six. Still the number is gradually increasing, and there are enough to constitute the germ of a possible Mission-school. I wish we had a Pastor. He might make something out of it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Carry your daily affairs to God. Ask his guidance in every emergency. Expect discoveries of his will. Let the promise of his help quicken all your faculties. Act for yourself energetically. Judge for yourself thoughtfully. Look unto God trustingly. Then will God both act and judge for you.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Among the various types of woman's character which the Bible affords us—and nearly every type of womanly excellence is to be found within its pages, the singer, the preacher, the warrior, the ruler, and, highest and most excellent of all, the faithful wife and mother—two possess peculiar pre-eminence, because they have christened with their names the books which narrate the story of their lives. One of these books—an idyl, a poem in prose—is the story of a peasant-girl who became mother of kings. It is full of a quiet, rural charm which has invested the very name of Ruth with a peculiar tenderness. The other carries us among courts and court intrigues, in times of direst peril, and narrates plots and counter-plots as marvelous and exciting as imagination ever conceived. It is the story of a nation saved by the brave fidelity of a single faithful woman, who, by her queenly courage, has made the name of Esther truly regal through all time.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
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
What has science to offer? This: that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed. No longer an absentee God; no longer a Great First Cause, setting in motion secondary causes which frame the world; no longer a divine mechanic, who has built the world, stored it with forces, launched it upon its course, and now and again interferes with its operation if it goes not right; but one great, eternal, underlying Cause, as truly operative to-day as he was in that first day when the morning stars sang together — every day a creative day. That is the word of science.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
I do not believe that the laws of nature have ever been violated, for this would be to believe that God who dwells in nature and animates it has violated the laws of his own being.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
For the orthodox, who thought it wrong to go to the theater, there were Barnum's Museum and Christy's Minstrels and Perham's Panorama. Barnum's Museum was situated at the corner of Ann Street and Broadway, opposite the old Astor House, which they are beginning to demolish as I am writing these lines. A band of half a dozen players upon brass instruments occupied a balcony and competed more or less successfully with the noise of the street. Within were all manner of curiosities, real and fictitious, and a little theater where went on some sort of a performance twice a day. It was labeled "Lecture Room," and the legend was current in college that a very orthodox and also a very simpleminded member of my brother's class, after inspecting the curiosities, went into this lecture room, expecting a prayer-meeting, and fled in horror from the spot when the curtain rose and disclosed some dancers or male and female acrobats, I forget which. There was for a little while a passion for panoramas, a kind of moving picture show quite unlike the modern "movies." John Banvard carried this form of exhibition to its climax in his panorama of the Mississippi, which he had painted himself traveling the Mississippi in a skiff for that purpose. The panorama is said to have been three miles long. We sat in our seats as the picture was unrolled before us for an hour and a half or more, and easily imagined ourselves on the deck of a Mississippi steamer watching the shore as we sailed down the river. Christy's Minstrels was a favorite recreation of my father's. I am inclined to think their jokes and conundrums were rather a bore to him; but they had good voices, and their music, though not of the highest kind, was, of its kind, the best. There was no Philharmonic or Symphony Society in those days, though I think the Oratorio Society existed, and there must have been an orchestra to accompany it. But Barnum, who was a great benefactor to his country as well as a great showman, brought Jenny Lind to America, and so set the fashion of importing famous singers to America, which later led on to the Metropolitan Opera.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
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
"God is love," says the apostle. We might almost transpose the apothegm, and say "Love is God." That is, it is love which renders him worthy of our worship. It is not the power which made the worlds and allotted them their courses; it is not the wisdom which orders all of life, and suffers not even the minutest detail to escape his notice; it is not even those aesthetic qualities, which have produced in divinely-created forms of beauty the types of all art and all architecture, that render God worthy " to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing." It is that his love is such that nothing seems to him too sacred to be sacrificed to the welfare of others.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
We made our own fish-lines, twisting and double-twisting and triple-twisting the silk, ganged on the hooks, bought the long bamboo poles and cut them up, and out of them made our own jointed fishing-rods. We always cleaned our fish ourselves. It was the law of the sport that our fun should not make work for others which we ourselves could do.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
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
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
Nothing is trivial to God which is of consequence to us. He is not so absorbed with the affairs of state that he can give no time or thought to the minor concerns of his children's life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Devout seekers after God are not infrequently separated from him by sorrow. It is said that sorrow brings one to God. So it sometimes does. But it sometimes estranges from God. Great sorrow often makes it seem for the time as though life were unjust, and there were no God ruling in the universe. This is a very common experience. It was the experience of Job in his distress, of the Psalmist in his exile, of Paul in his struggle with life and death, and principalities and powers, and things present and things to come. It was in the experience of the Master himself when he cried, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If when we look out upon life and see its travail of pain, or when the anguish of life enters our own soul and embitters it, the sun sometimes seems blotted out of the heavens, and God seems gone, we are not to chide ourselves; we are to remember that our experience of temporary oblivion of the Almighty is an experience which the devout in all ages have known. Wait thou his time. Blessed is he who in such an hour of sorrow, when it seems as though God were departing, still holds to him, and cries, "My God! my God!"
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Oh! fools and blind, not to know the Master whose servant nature is.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
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
A murder had been committed in New Jersey. A man was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for the murder. In his dying speech he professed his innocence and charged the murder upon another man. This speech the "Times" reported. For publishing that report the man so accused brought a libel suit against the "Times." It was referred to me to ascertain what were the facts in the case and what probability there was in the charge. The result of my amateur detective work was my own conviction that, on the one hand, the charge could not be proved true, and, on the other hand, it was not wholly improbable. When the case came on for trial, the results of my inquiries were given to the jury, for the double purpose of proving that there was no malice in the publication, and that the plaintiff was so under a shadow from other circumstances that this publication could not have been a great injury to his already damaged reputation. My brother then moved to dismiss the complaint, on the ground that long-continued tradition as well as public policy justified the practice of allowing the condemned to make a speech upon the scaffold, and now that the public were no longer admitted to witness the execution, the same policy justified the press in giving that speech to the public. The question was new. The Judge reserved its determination for the opinion of the three judges at the General Term, and directed the jury to render a verdict subject to that opinion. The jury assessed the damage at six cents, and the plaintiff pursued the case no further.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
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
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