A Scotch geologist and religious writer; born at Stirling, 1851; died at Tunbridge Wells, England, March 11, 1897. He studied theology at Edinburgh University, but did not adopt the clerical profession. In 1877 he was appointed professor of natural science in the Free Church College, Glasgow. “Natural Law in the Spiritual World” (1883), and its successor “The Ascent of Man,” applications of modern scientific methods to the immaterial universe, have made his popular fame. He traveled in Central Africa (1883–84) studying its botany and geology, and later wrote the highly interesting and instructive volume on “Tropical Africa” (1888). Other semi-religious writings of his are: “Pax Vobiscum” (1890); “The Greatest Thing in the World” (1890); “The Programme of Christianity” (1892).

Personal

  Tall and somewhat slim, as I have said, dressed and bearing himself like a perfect gentleman; a head finely molded, a forehead of unusual breadth and height, eyes of magnetic power with light-points of sparkling brilliance; hair, mustache, and side-whiskers of delicate texture and fair of hue—such was my first physiognomic impression of Professor Drummond…. Few popular writers have so rare a gift of self-repression; fewer still can rely with such perfect confidence on the internal evidences of authorship.

  Drummond was a good talker; but what was more striking than his talk was his capacity for listening. There was a genuine modesty in him which made it easy for him to assume the attitude of a learner, even toward those whose knowledge gave them less right to speak than himself. He stooped to learn where another would have exalted himself to teach. Often it would happen that a theological discussion would go on for an hour or two in which Drummond took no part. He would lie back in an easy-chair listening in perfect silence. Then at the end he would ask a quiet question, or make an epigrammatic remark, which was more luminous than all our talk.

  What impressed me that pleasant evening in the days of long ago I can now identify. It was the lad’s distinction, an inherent quality of appearance and manner of character and soul which marked him and made him solitary…. Upon a platform of evangelists, or sitting among divinity students in a dingy classroom, or cabined in the wooden respectability of an ecclesiastical court, or standing in a crowd of passengers at a railway station, he suggested golden embroidery upon hodden gray…. Drummond was a handsome man, such as you could not match in ten days’ journey, with delicately cut features, rich auburn hair, and a certain carriage of nobility, but the distinction and commanding feature of his face was his eye. No photograph could do it justice, and very often photographs have done it injustice, by giving the idea of staringness. His eye was not bold or fierce; it was tender and merciful. But it had a power and hold which were little else than irresistible and almost supernatural. When you talked with Drummond he did not look at you and out of the window alternately, as is the usual manner, he never moved his eyes and gradually their penetrating gaze seemed to reach and encompass your soul. It was as Plato imagined it would be in the judgment; one soul was in contact with another—nothing between.

  His presence was bright and exhilarating as sunshine. An even happiness and disengagement from all selfish care were his characteristics. Sometimes one thought that with his brilliant gifts, his great opportunities, his rare success, it was easy for him to be happy; but his prolonged and painful illness has shown us that his happiness was far more surely founded. Penetrate as deeply as you might into his nature, and scrutinise it as keenly, you never met anything to disappoint, anything to incline you to suspend your judgment or modify your verdict that here you had a man as nearly perfect as you had ever known anyone to be. To see him in unguarded moments was only to see new evidence of the absolute purity and nobility of his nature, to see him in trying circumstances was only to have his serenity and soundness of spirit thrown into stronger relief.

  Not four years have passed by since Professor Drummond visited the colleges of this New World. Those whose good fortune it was to hear Mr. Drummond will recall the patrician face and form, the finely cut features, the countenance suffused with solar light, the great, rich, wonderful soul throbbing and blushing behind its defenses of flesh and cuticle. He seemed what the lower class men in his university called him, the Prince.

  Perhaps the most conspicuous service which Henry Drummond rendered to his generation was to show them a Christianity which was perfectly natural. You met him somewhere, a graceful, well-dressed gentleman, tall and lithe, with a swing in his walk and a brightness on his face, who seemed to carry no cares and to know neither presumption nor timidity. You spoke, and found him keen for any of a hundred interests. He fished, he shot, he skated as few can, he played cricket; he would go any distance to see a fire or a football match. He had a new story, a new puzzle, or a new joke every time he met you…. If you were alone with him, he was sure to find out what interested you, and listen by the hour. The keen brown eyes got at your heart, and you felt you could speak your best to them. Sometimes you would remember that he was Drummond the evangelist, Drummond the author of books which measured their circulation by scores of thousands. Yet there was no assumption of superiority nor any ambition to gain influence—nothing but the interest of one healthy human being in another.

  Out of doors, salmon-fishing, deer-stalking, and, when he got the chance, the pursuit of “big game,” all had considerable fascination for him. Salmon-fishing was once characterised by him as his besetting sin, and he missed few opportunities of indulging in it, either in our Scottish Highlands, or in Canada and the Wild West. He was also a very good skater. Rambling too, as might have been expected in one of his scientific turns of mind, had great attractions for him. As an onlooker, he retained a well-informed interest in and knowledge of cricket and foot-ball, and was frequently to be seen on the grand stand at International matches.

  The fibre of his nature was vigorous; it was the virility of his manhood which, combined with his freedom from religious professionalism and the fascination of his personality, made him pre-eminently a preacher to young men. He knew men and boys thoroughly and was at home with them; there is a noticeable absence of references to women in the biographical sketches which have appeared. His supreme interest was in young men, and he became pre-eminently a teacher of youth. Like all men of contagious enthusiasm and captivating vitality, he had high spirits and a great appetite for fun. The boy was immortal in him; that abiding presence of the spirit of youth which is the witness of the creative mood. To the end of his life humor and gayety were matched in him with charming urbanity and unfailing courtesy.

Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 1883

  Have you seen a book by a certain Professor Henry Drummond, called “Natural Law in the Spiritual World,” which has had an astonishing success over here? The best public, perhaps, does not much care for it; but the second best, all the religious world, and even the more serious portion of the aristocratical world, have accepted the book as a godsend, and are saying to themselves that here at last is safety and scientific shelter for the orthodox supernaturalism which seemed menaced with total defeat. I should like much to know what you think of the book, though I can hardly imagine its suiting any public but that very peculiar and indirect-thinking public which we have in England. What is certain is, that the author of the book has a genuine love of religion and a genuine religious experience; and this gives his book a certain value, though his readers, in general, imagine its value to be quite of another kind.

  It is evident that it is simply our old friend, the “Shorter Catechism,” in a scientific dress. In other words, it is the world of Calvinistic Christianity—of the peculiar system of theology which turns on the ideas of original sin, fall, redemption, regeneration, election and pre-destination.

  The genesis of “Natural Law in the Spiritual World” indicates the secret of its success. It is not a contribution to philosophy; it was not conceived in a philosophic spirit. It is not an attempt to reconcile Science and Religion, and it is not written with a dogmatic purpose to defend the latter from attack by the former. It is a statement of religious truth by a man schooled in scientific methods, but animated by the religious spirit…. It was no sooner published than it began to create a great excitement. Some scientists, of course, sneered at its science; some religionists assailed its religion; some philosophers measured it as a contribution to philosophy and criticised its fundamental postulate…. Men who had been revolted from religion by the patois in which it had been clothed were attracted to it when they found it disrobed of the patois expressed in terms with which they were familiar and which they could understand. Regeneration became Biogenesis; Depravity became Degeneration; Sanctification became Growth, and so throughout. “Natural Law in the Spiritual World” affords a splendid illustration of how a minister possessing the spirit of Christ may impart it to new auditors and in new circles if he will not foolishly confuse life with the phrases with which he is familiar and insist that men can accept the one only in case they will use the other.

The Ascent of Man, 1894

  In his book, “The Ascent of Man,” the extraordinary attitude taken by him, and the stupendous self-satisfaction of his “find,” affect the reader with the same feeling as would the immensity of an ocean of froth—the infinitude of a universe of cloud. In his preface he strikes the keynote, of which the whole book is simply a variation in different movements; and the key-note is—no one before Professor Henry Drummond discovered the law of altruism as a natural condition of moral and social evolution, as a governing factor in the conduct of man to man. Where others have been content to regard it as a modifying and progressive influence, sweetening the acerbities and softening the severities of that earlier condition wherein the struggle for life was the absolute necessity, if racial and individual life were to survive at all, he has found it as the supreme motive force from the beginning. And this is the first sound given by the tinkling cymbal he calls his philosophy…. We take exception to the unscientific and more than sickly tone of Professor Drummond’s eulogium on the Love which he asserts rules creation from the protoplastic base to the summit of human society at the end of the nineteenth century…. That he has succeeded in his aim is proved by the enormous success of his book—mere hash of other men’s labour as it is—a plagiarism from first to last. It is a thing of this kind which makes one despair of one’s generation…. Whatever is true is borrowed; whatever is false, strained, and inconclusive, is his own. His sin is the sin of plagiarism, with the additional offence of distortion in the lifting.

  The work is much the most important he has left us.

  The great contribution which this volume makes to the doctrine of evolution is the emphasis which it puts upon the Struggle for Others as a necessary accompaniment to the Struggle for Existence in the process of development. It is a scientific representation of the law of love. Scientists have criticised this volume because of its prose-poetry; but Tyndall has shown that imagination has rendered an inestimable service in the discoveries of science, and Henry Drummond has simply proved that it may be equally useful in the exposition of science. But the theme of the book is not fully worked out, and carries man’s religious development scarcely farther than Le Conte had carried it in his “Evolution in its Relation to Religious Thought.”

  The book did not please the orthodox party so well as the “Natural Law,” and it met with much scientific opposition, but, at the same time, it made a host of friends. It certainly did something to correct the exaggeration of natural selection as a selfish and brutal struggle for existence, though it was less original in this respect than Drummond seemed to think, and it is true that he confounded the struggle of species, of which “the struggle for others” is a part, with that of individuals.

  “The Ascent of Man” was Drummond’s greatest piece of work. It had not a circulation that compared either with that of the earlier book, although this is no inexplicable fact, or of those marvellous addresses on Love, Peace, The Programme of Christianity, The City without a Church, and The Changed Life, that carried his name into thousands of widely separated homes. The mission of “The Ascent of Man” was different,—a mission that is yet not perfectly fulfilled. Critics pointed out slight errors of fact in the text, but they are insignificant beside the mistaken judgment involved in the title of the book, which seemed to challenge an altogether insupportable but utterly unintentional comparison with the better-known Darwinian volume. Drummond himself had said in the Preface to the work, “It is a History, not an Argument.”

General

  Wherein lies the secret of Professor Drummond’s success? To answer this question satisfactorily would require much more time and space than can be given to it in the present article; we would simply state our belief that the secret of Professor Drummond’s success lies in the kind of Christianity which he preaches…. What the college student of the present time asks for, and must have, is a Christianity which appeals not only to his emotions and sentiment, but also to his sound common sense and enlightened reason. It was such Christianity as this which was preached by Professor Henry Drummond. Liberal in his views, in the truest and best sense of the word, he set before his hearers a Christianity which was at once pure, simple, and manly. To their proper place within the walls of theological seminaries he relegated the discussion of dogmas and creeds, and left in their place a faith which was human as well as divine…. The Christianity inculcated by Professor Drummond does not ask that we frown on the beauties of art in all its varied forms, nor does it consider amusement, either in-door or out-door, to be the play-things of the devil. On the other hand, we are entreated to bring our Christianity into everything, whether it be business or pleasure, and in this manner elevate and ennoble all that we do…. So much for “Athletic Christianity” and the work of the “noble Scotchman” among the college students of America.

  Professor Drummond’s influence on his contemporaries is not to be measured by the sale of his books, great as that has been. It may be doubted whether any living novelist has had so many readers, and perhaps no living writer has been so eagerly followed and so keenly discussed on the Continent and in America…. Professor Drummond had the widest vogue from Norway to Germany. There was a time when scarcely a week passed in Germany without the publication of a book or pamphlet in which his views were canvassed. In Scandinavia, perhaps, no other living Englishman was so widely known. In every part of America his books had an extraordinary circulation. This influence reached all classes. It was strong among scientific men, whatever may be said to the contrary. Among such men as Von Moltke, Mr. Arthur Balfour, and others belonging to the governing class, it was stronger still. It penetrated to every section of the Christian Church, and far beyond these limits. Still, when this is said, it remains true that his deepest influence was personal and hidden.

  If Martin Luther and Bishop Butler came at a strategic hour, it was the good fortune of Professor Drummond to speak at one of those psychological moments when the world, eager and expectant, waited for some prophet of reconciliation. Not an intellectual giant himself, it was given him to usher in an era of friendship between giants hitherto at enmity. He taught the world that it was possible to be a rigid scientist and also a sweet-hearted Christian. With him character was a thousand times more than culture, and Christ’s words about the soul were infinitely more important than man’s words about sticks, stones, and stars.

  It is possible to imagine that the truth in “Natural Law in the Spiritual World” may so become part of universal experience that the volume will drop out of sight,—some books are forgotten because they succeed; it is easy to fancy that fuller appreciation of the relations between scientific and religious thought will make the thesis of “The Ascent of Man” a commonplace, and to read the book a work of supererogation; but so long as boys are keen to play straight in the game of life, so long will that allegory live for their encouragement and their love…. In Drummond’s mind there was no sharp demarcation of things as secular and sacred. Life itself was too divine in its opportunities to suffer such cleavage.