Parenting & Family Quote by Lyman Abbott

A child arrives here as a metaphysical light source: not merely innocent, but emissary. Abbott’s “beam of sunlight” metaphor does double work. It sentimentalizes childhood in a way his era loved, then quietly recruits that sentiment for a moral argument. Sunlight implies purity and necessity; you don’t interrogate it, you bask in it. By rooting that beam in “the Infinite and Eternal,” Abbott isn’t just praising kids. He’s staking a claim about origin: children aren’t accidents of biology or social class but evidence of a larger order. That’s the subtextual move that turns a domestic image into theology.

The sly hinge is “possibilities of virtue and vice.” Abbott won’t let innocence become a blank check. He acknowledges moral range, but he refuses the older Calvinist reflex that treats children as born stained. “As yet unstained” is a rebuttal to original sin without saying so outright. It also flatters parental responsibility: if the child is currently clean, then whatever comes next is on the world that raises them. The line carries an implicit warning to institutions - family, church, school, industrial society - that they can either nurture the sunlight or smoke it over.

Context matters. Abbott was a prominent liberal Protestant voice in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period juggling Victorian piety, urbanization, immigration, and reform movements that would feed into the Social Gospel. This quote reads like a bridge between faith and progress: spiritual dignity plus environmental influence, a moral ecology where society’s job is not to “save” the child from inherent depravity but to keep them from being dirtied in the first place.