Abbott, Lyman 1835-1922

ABBOTT, LYMAN 1835-1922

Congregational minister, writer, editor

Outlook

As the 1910s opened, Lyman Abbott was seventy-five years old and had already fit several careers into a single lifetime. He had ended the nineteenth century by resigning from his position as pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Congregational Church in 1899. His life in the twentieth century was focused on writing and editing his enormously successful and influential paper Outlook; lecturing at universities; and shaping public debate on a variety of political, social, and religious topics of the turn of the century. Under Abbott's direction Outlook had grown from a circulation of 15,000 (when it was known as the Christian Union) in 1876 to 30,000 in 1893, to 100,000 in 1900, and to a peak of 125,000 in 1910, when Theodore Roosevelt was a member of its staff. It was among the strongest voices in political, social, and religious thought. Through it Abbott was a strong supporter of liberal causes, of progress, and of the presidency and later candidacy (in 1912) of Theodore Roosevelt. Abbott repudiated strict Darwinism but accepted many tenets of evolution, adapting them to Christian thought and making them more palatable for skeptical Christians. As war neared in Europe, Abbott became a vociferous champion of U.S. involvement, joining what in retrospect appears to have been a deeply prejudiced campaign against the German people. But this position defied Abbott's usual progressive stances on political and religious issues and sounds an unfortunate ending note to an otherwise stellar career of thoughtful analyses, synthesis, and opinion on some of the central religious and theological issues of his time.

Origins

Abbott was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1835 but grew up primarily in Farmington, Maine, until 1843, when, upon the death of his mother, the family moved to New York City. He was educated in schools operated by his uncles and at fourteen entered New York University. At age eighteen he graduated and joined the law firm of his brothers, Austin and Vaughn. He practiced law for six years before abandoning it in order to fulfill a boyhood desire to become a minister. He was ordained in Farmington in 1860 at the age of twenty-four and promptly began his second career two weeks later at a Congregational church in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Reconstruction

He served in Indiana throughout the Civil War and became a strong advocate of reconciliation and Reconstruction. In 1865 he resigned as pastor of the church to become a secretary of the American Union Commission, a group dedicated to cooperating with the government on the Reconstruction of the South. While working for the commission he was also pastor of the New England Congregational Church in New York City. He remained in both positions for four years. By this time he had begun to write book reviews for Harper's Magazine while developing his own ideas about Christian duty and society. He also began to practice journalism as well as other writing.

Editor

In 1870 Abbott became the editor of a new periodical called The Illustrated Christian Weekly, for which he worked until 1876. He then became associated with Henry Ward Beecher as coeditor of the Christian Union, the position in which he would remain for fortysix years. After Beecher's departure from the paper in 1881, Abbott became editor in chief and changed the paper's name to Outlook in 1893. But Beecher left Abbott something else as well. The great preacher died in 1887, and Abbott was invited to become the temporary pastor of Beecher's church, the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn. He was well received and became the permanent pastor in 1890. He served in this position for ten years while also retaining control of the ever-growing Outlook. He was a prolific author during the 1890s, publishing six books in nine years. He and Washington Gladden became two of the most prominent popularizers of liberal theology and practical Christianity. Among his books during this decade were The Evolution of Christianity (1892), Christianity and Social Problems (1896), and The Theology of an Evolutionist (1897). While many Christians were denouncing Darwinism and some scientists were dismissing religion, Abbott looked for a compromise position. Though he found natural selection unpleasant and considered it simply wrong, he chose to use evolutionary thought as a basis for reaffirming faith. "For the question whether God made the animal man by a mechanical process in an hour or by a process of growth continuing through centuries is quite immaterial to one who believes that into man God breathes a divine life/' he wrote in 1915.

The Christian Rationale for War

The focus of Abbott's work in the 1910s was primarily in justifying preparedness for war on Germany for Christians who were troubled by religious scruples against war. His opinions regarding World War I, at the time popular, defensible, and commonplace, in retrospect are difficult to understand from a man who had urged reconciliation and rebuilding after the Civil War and whose career had been grounded in liberal theology. After the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, Abbott pressed for war on Germany. In a speech in May 1916 Abbott, citing Christ's words that those who live by the sword should perish by the sword, said, "We have that sword given us by our Master, and we will not sheathe it until the predatory Potsdam gang has perished from the face of the earth." The speech was telegraphed throughout the country. In 1918 Abbott published The Twentieth Century Crusade, in which he "contends that our participation in this world war furnishes a striking evidence of the power of Christianity, and the extent with which its spirit has pervaded the nation." He approved of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, measures that effectively curtailed freedom of expression for those who did not support the war. He opined that pacifists had no rights of assembly, that banning German music was "not unreasonable," and vehemently opposed the notion of forgiveness for Germany at the war's end. In short, the war against Germany was a holy war against evil, and Abbott, among many others in positions of religious leadership, fanned public opinion against Germany and worked to curtail dissent at home. In the midst of the decade he published his Reminiscences (1915), the story of a singular life, long and controversial, that bridged an old world to a new one. He died in 1922.

Sources:

Lyman Abbott, Reminiscences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915);

Ira V. Brown, Lyman Abbott: Christian Evolutionist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953).