Editor of the influential Christian progressive journal Outlook and intimate with Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Roosevelt, Lymon Abbott (1835 1922) played a central role in religion and politics in the turn-of-the-century America. In The Theology of an Evolutionist (1897), Abbott shows his characteristic optimism in human moral development, as he argues that the Christian faith can fully accommodate evolution as the means by which God changes and improves the world over time. Abbott writes 'not to disbelievers in evolution to prove that they are mistaken, but to believers in evolution to...