Life & Wisdom Quote by Lyman Abbott

Abbott’s line has the clean snap of a Protestant compass: life isn’t a scenic wandering, it’s a march. That single word compresses a whole 19th-century moral psychology - disciplined, linear, and impatient with ambiguity. You don’t drift through experience; you advance under pressure, step by step, toward an outcome that will eventually name you.

The structure is doing the persuading. “Innocence” is positioned as the default condition, a starting bank of purity you didn’t earn. “Temptation” sits in the middle like an unavoidable checkpoint, not an exotic detour. That framing matters: Abbott isn’t scandalized by temptation so much as he treats it as the proving ground where the self becomes legible. The subtext is that character isn’t a private vibe, it’s a verdict delivered by choices made under desire.

Then comes the hard bifurcation: “virtue or vice.” No third door, no sustained moral mixed state. For a modern reader, that binary can feel blunt, even coercive. For Abbott’s context - a Congregationalist-turned-liberal Protestant voice in an America wrestling with industrialization, urban saloons, and the Social Gospel’s push to moralize public life - it’s strategic. He’s not only counseling individuals; he’s offering a social technology. If lives predictably “march” toward virtue or vice, then institutions (churches, schools, reform movements) can claim urgency: intervene early, steer the march, save the citizen.

What makes the line work is its quiet bargain: accept a demanding moral storyline, and you get clarity in return - a map for judging yourself and, inevitably, others.