American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

ABBOTT, LYMAN

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(18 December 1835, Roxbury, MA-22 October 1922, New York, NY). Education: B.A., New York University, 1853; read law, passed N.Y. bar exam, 1856. Career: lawyer, 1853-59; minister at Terre Haute, IN, 1860-65; secretary of American Freedman's Union Commission, 1865--69; minister, New York, NY, 1865--69; contributor to Harper's Magazine and Independent, 1869-71; editor, Illustrated Christian Weekly, 1871-76; editor, Christian Union, 1876--93, and its successor, Outlook, 1893-1922; minister, Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, NY, 1888-99. 

For better and for worse, Lyman Abbott is remembered for the aphorism, "Evolution is God's way of doing things." The phrase aptly summarizes the belief of liberal Christians at the time that Darwinism did not contradict essential Christian values. But today, a century after Abbott succeeded Henry Ward Beecher at Plymouth Church, Abbott's confidence seems naive. 

Like many other leading Congregational ministers of his generation, Abbott entered the ministry after experimenting with another profession, the law. And like others, he was a publicist as well as a preacher. Abbott not only believed that Darwinism was compatible with Christianity, he also applied the concept of evolution to the Bible, the church, society, and the soul. In The Theology of an Evolutionist (1897) he gave a sympathetic account of the work of Herbert Spencer and other evolutionists, while upholding the essentials of Christianity. In The Life and Literature of the Ancient Hebrews (1901) he accepted the findings of modem biblical scholarship, while reaffirming the spiritual values of the Old Testament 
As an editor Abbott shaped Outlook into one of the most influential periodicals of the time. Among the writers he published was a close friend, Theodore Roosevelt. Abbott supported Roosevelt's progressive reforms and shared his advocacy of an American "empire." Of the American annexation of the Philippines he wrote, "I do not defend or apologize for what we have done in the Philippines. I glory in it." 

In such views Abbott reflected the values of contemporary America: humanitarian but expansionistic, inquisitive but devout, supremely confident that the world he knew operated according to "God's way of doing things." 

Bibliography 
A: The Evolution of Christianity (Boston, 1892); Christianity and Social Problems (Boston, 1896); The Theology of an Evolutionist (Boston, 1897); The Life and Literature of the Ancient Hebrews (1901); The Great Companion (New York. 1904); Reminiscences (Boston, 1915; 1923); What Christianity Means to Me: A Spiritual Autobiography (New York, 1921). 
B: DAB I, 24-25; DARB, 4-5; NCAB 1,473; NYT 23 October 1922, 1; SH I, 7; William W. Sweet, Makers of Christianity: From John Cotton to Lyman Abbott (New York, 1937); Ira V. Brown, Lyman Abbott: Christian Evolutionist (Cambridge, Mass., 1953; Westport, Conn., 1970); Edward Smith Parsons, "Lyman Abbott," in Religion in Life, 47 (1978), 313-319.