The Fourfold Gospel: Section I Introduction

by Edwin A. Abbott

Excerpt from The Fourfold Gospel: Section I Introduction
Previous Parts (published in 1900-12) of the series of which this is the tenth have dealt mostly with words. This Part will attempt to elucidate thoughts with the help of the evidence extracted from the elucidations of words. The earlier volumes might perhaps be described as a letting down of nets. If so, this one might be called an attempt to draw them in.
The "nets" were, in fact, footnotes, which, in former volumes, were very many and very long. They were also often apparently digressive. The reason was that I mostly wrote them with a view to future investigations as well as, or more than, to the matter in hand. When fishermen let down their nets, the boats that row round a shoal of fish sometimes look as though they were rowing away from it; and my boats often (I dare say) presented the appearance of rowing away from that which they were attempting to surround and capture.
Now I fear that I may incur an opposite charge. The notes in the present volume may seem too few and too slight to justify the statements placed in the text above them. If they do, I must ask the reader to remember that fishermen cannot draw nets in, and let them down, at one and the same time.
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203 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1913

About the author

People best know British theologian and writer Edwin Abbott Abbott for his imaginative satirical novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884).

This English schoolmaster authored of the mathematical satire.

He was educated at the city of London school and at college of Saint John, Cambridge, where he as fellow took the highest honors in classics, mathematics, and theology. In 1862, he took orders. After holding masterships at school of king Edward, Birmingham, and at Clifton college, he succeeded G.F. Mortimer as headmaster of the City of London School in 1865 at the early age of 26 years. He was Hulsean lecturer in 1876.

He retired in 1889, and devoted himself to literary and theological pursuits. Liberal inclinations of Abbott in theology were prominent both in his educational views and in his books. His Shakespearian Grammar (1870) is a permanent contribution to English philology. In 1885 he published a life of Francis Bacon. His theological writings include three anonymously published religious romances - Philochristus (1878), Onesimus (1882), and Sitanus (1906).

More weighty contributions are the anonymous theological discussion The Kernel and the Husk (1886), Philomythus (1891), his book The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman (1892), and his article "The Gospels" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, embodying a critical view which caused considerable stir in the English theological world. He also wrote St Thomas of Canterbury, his Death and Miracles (1898), Johannine Vocabulary (1905), Johannine Grammar (1906). Flatland was published in 1884.

Sources that say he is the brother of Evelyn Abbott (1843 - 1901), who was a well-known tutor of Balliol College, Oxford, and author of a scholarly history of Greece, are in error.