American theologian and author (1835-1922)
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
When we got back to Wheathedge, Tuesday afternoon, we found the parsonage undergoing transformations so great that you would hardly know it. Miss Moore had got Mr. Hardcap, sure enough, to repair it. She had agreed to pay for the material, and he was to furnish the labor. The fence was straightened, and the gate re-hung, and the blinds mended up, and Mr. Hardcap was on the roof patching it where it leaked or threatened to. Deacon Goodsole had a bevy of boys from the Sabbath-school at work in the garden under his direction. If there is anything the Deacon takes a pride in, next to his horse, it is his garden, and he said that the parson should have a chance for the best garden in town. Great piles of weeds stood in the walk. Two boys were spading up; another was planting; a fourth was wheeling away the weeds; and still another was bringing manure from the Deacon's stable. Miss Moore was setting out some rose-bushes before the door; and the Deacon himself, with his coat off, was trimming and tying up a rather dilapidated looking grape-vine over a still more dilapidated grape arbor.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Warm hearts are better than great thoughts.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The experience of personal communication with God is as universal as the human race. Appreciation of the divine presence is more common than appreciation of art, music, or literature. Men and women who do not respond to music, see no beauty in pictures, never read, and could not understand literature if it were read to them, yet find comfort in sorrow, strength in temptation, courage in danger, and added joy in their enjoyments from the sense of a Father's presence.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
That is the best sermon, not which is a great pulpit effort, but which is helpful. If, young men, you have preached a sermon and some one comes up to you and says that was a great pulpit effort, hide your head in shame and go home and never write another like it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
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
Never say you are too old. You do not say it now, perhaps; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the eyes grow dim and the young despair comes to curse the old age, you will say, "It is too late for me." Never too late! Never too old! How old are you--thirty, fifty, eighty? What is that in immortality? We are but children.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
It was a pretty place. A little cottage, French gray with darker trimmings of the same; the tastiest little porch with a something or other—I know the vine by sight but not to this day by name—creeping over it, and converting it into a bower; another porch fragrant with climbing roses and musical with the twittering of young swallows who had made their nests in little chambers curiously constructed under the eaves and hidden among the sheltering leaves; a green sward sweeping down to the road, with a few grand old forest trees scattered carelessly about as though nature had been the landscape gardner; and prettiest of all, a little boy and girl playing horse upon the gravel walk, and filling the air with shouts of merry laughter—all this combined to make as pretty a picture as one would wish to see. The western sun poured a flood of light upon it through crimson clouds, and a soft glory from the dying day made this little Eden of earth more radiant by a baptism from heaven.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Gradually my whole conception of the relation of God to the universe has changed. I am sure that I have not lost my experience of God. I am far more certain now than I was forty years ago that God is, and that God is not an absentee God. I am not quite so certain as I once was about some of the manifestations which I once thought he had made of himself. I am a great deal more certain than I once was of his personal relation to me. My experience of God has changed only to grow deeper, broader, and stronger. But my conception of God's relation to the universe has changed radically. My hypothesis was — God an engineer who had made an engine and sat apart from it, ruling it; God a king who had made the human race and sat apart from men, ruling them. That was my hypothesis; now I have another hypothesis. And I think the change which has come over my mind is coming and has come over the minds of a great many. I think that there is nothing original in what I am going to say to you this morning, for I am only going to interpret to you a change, perhaps not altogether understood, which is being wrought in the mind of the whole Christian Church. I think my change only reflects your change. But whether that be true or not, I am sure the change has taken place in me.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
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
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
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
The most beautiful statue that Powers ever chiseled does not compare for grace and beauty with the Divine model. The same mystic element of life is wanting.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
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
There were no such bachelor apartments in New York City in 1850 as now encourage bachelordom and discourage marriage. There were few clubs. We three brothers generally lived in hired rooms and took our meals at restaurants. Once we tried breakfasting in our own rooms, but that was expensively luxurious. Once we tried to economize by boarding in Brooklyn. Going home one late afternoon, I found a sheriff in charge, the landlady having failed and her property having been taken in execution. We had some difficulty in persuading the sheriff to let us take our property, which consisted of clothing and some books. Perhaps the fact that my brother Vaughan had at that time been admitted to the bar and had some knowledge of the law helped to overcome the reluctance of the sheriff. We camped out that night in my brother's office. I slept, I remember, on the floor, with a Webster's Dictionary for a pillow. That was our last attempt at boarding. After my brother Vaughan graduated and went to Harvard Law School and before he came back and was admitted to the bar, my brother Austin and I occupied together a room so small that when our turn-up bedstead was opened out on the floor the entrance to the room was completely blocked. One night about Christmas, my brother Vaughan arriving unexpectedly late at night, we had to make up the bed in order to let him in.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
Besides looking at the house we asked the usual house-hunting questions. Mr. Sinclair was in the city. He wanted to sell because he was going to Europe in the spring to educate his children. He would sell his place for $10,000 or rent it for $800. For the summer? No! for the year. He did not care to rent it for the summer, nor to give possession before fall. Would he rent the furniture? Yes, if one wanted it. But that would be extra. How much land was there? About two acres. Any fruit? Pears, peaches, and the smaller fruits—strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Whereupon Jennie and I bowed ourselves out and went away.
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
Jesus Christ did not come into the world merely to be a spectacle, merely to show us who and what God is, and then depart and leave us where we were before. "I am the door," He says. A door is to push open and go through. He is the door; through Him God enters into humanity. He is the door; through Him humanity enters into God. He has come into the world in order that we, coming to some knowledge and apprehension of the divine nature, coming to understand what divine justice, divine truth, divine life, divine purity, divine love are, may the better enter into that life and be ourselves filled with all the fullness of God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist