BOOKS.
HENRY DRUMMOND AS A RELIGIOUS TEACHER.* WE must confess that we have never been able quite to understand the importance attached to the late Professor Drummond as a thinker. Years ago he published a very fanciful and rather superficial work in which he endeavoured to show that there was a working of natural law in the spiritual world. Had that work been on a level with the pro- foundest ideas of Pascal, it could not have been taken up with greater enthusiasm. We were invited to believe that once more a profound thinker bad arisen, with some kind of new discovery in religious ideas. We do not for one moment suppose that Henry Drummond was himself responsible for this superficial value put by an imperfectly instructed public on an interesting, but not very profound work ; it was rather due to a certain craze (we can use no other term) which sweeps over whole communities, and which, it appears, made Drum- mond known, as Mr. Robertson Nicoll tells us, more widely in Scandinavia than any living Englishman, and gave to his books " an extraordinary circulation " in every part of America. And now, in his memorial sketch, Ian Maclaren tells us that Drummond had himself given up the ideas of this popular attempt to reconcile science and religion in the minds of a public which has a mere smattering of science, and in which there is not one man in ten thousand with a mind either strong enough or sufficiently instructed to comprehend the nature of the problem. "My own idea," writes Ian Maclaren, " is that he had abandoned its main contention and much of its teaching, and would have been quite willing to see it withdrawn from the public,"—a warning, surely, against the tendency to "boom" popular works on difficult intellectual problems.
What the present work proves is that it was Professor Drummond's personal qualities, his enthusiasm, zeal, sweet- ness of disposition, and deep religious feeling—not his intel- lectual powers—which endeared him to his friends and made for him a name as a religious force of his time. His two friends, Mr. Nicoll and Ian Maclaren, have here unveiled to some extent his inner life, and have portrayed for us a very fine character. It seems, according to Mr. Nicoll, that Drummond's principal inspirers were Ruskin and Emerson. The former taught him "to see the world as it is," while the "lightness, sparseness, and transparency" of the latter's nature had a strong affinity for the nature of Drummond. His religious guides were in an especial degree Channing and Frederic Robertson, who led him to see that God is good and that God is human. He was also a warm admirer of Mr. R. H. Hatton, whose essay on Goethe he thought "the best critical piece of the century." At the Free Church College in Glasgow he came under the influence of Dr. Marcus Dods, "to whom, as he always testified, he owed more than to any other man." Keenly interested as he seems to have been in theological speculation, his proper field was that religious culture of the heart to which the discourses in the present volume testify. His work in the Free Church College lay in the direction of natural science, and he lectured on botany and geology, giving also scattered talks on biological problems. During his intervals of leisure he travelled widely, paying three visits to America, one to Australia, and one to Africa, the outcome of which latter was his fascinating book on Tropical Africa. One of the visits to America was largely taken up with the delivery of his Lowell Lectures at Boston on "The Ascent of Man." In this work Drummond attempted the reconciliation of science with a theistic con- ception of the universe, and endeavoured to meet the impeach- ment of the order of things as made by those who see in it only the pitiless struggle for existence and the sacrifice of countless myriads of sentient beings in order that the favoured species should survive. " With nutrition he asso- ciated," says Mr. Nicoll, "as a second factor, the function of • The Ideal Life, and other Unpublished Addresses. By Henry Drummond, FAA& With Memorial Sketches by W. Robertson Nicoll and Ian Maclaren. London : Hodder and Stoughton. reproduction, the struggle for the life of others, and main- tained that this was of co-ordinate rank ae a force in cosmic evolution. Though others had recognised altruism as modify- ing the operation of egoism, Mr. Drummond did more. He tried to indicate the place of altruism as the outcome of those processes whereby the species is multiplied, and its bearing on the evolution of ethics. He desired, in other words, a unification of concept, the filling up of great gulfs that had seemed to be fixed." Ian Maclaren says in his sketch that this book may be called " the Poem of Evolution." It was assailed by both theologians and men of science.
Both his friends attempt to convey, as we have hinted, an impression of Drummond's personal charm, which must have been remarkable. Ian Maclaren says that it could be affirmed of him to a greater degree than any other man he ever knew, that "he did not know sin. As Fra Angelico could paint the Holy Angels because he had seen them, but made poor work of the devils because to him they were strange creatures,—so this man could make holiness so lovely that all men wished to be Christians; but his hand lost its cunning at the mention of sin, for he had never played the fool." His nature had a curious aloofness; he was interested in causes, but could not be a vehement partisan. " None could be more loyal in the private offices of friendship, but he would not have flung him- self into his friend's public quarrel." He received confidences, but gave none ; he was eager in affection, but yet always stood alone. Handsome in person, he attracted attention, and, like the Ancient Mariner, held you with his eye. His influence, says Ian Maclaren, was peculiarly mesmeric, "he seized one directly by his living personality." He held, to use the words of his teacher Emerson, "an original relation with the universe ; " and so never undertook any work to which he did not feel himself called. He never, says Mr. Robertson Nicoll, "wrote an unkind word about any one, never retaliated, never bore malice, and could do full justice to the abilities and character of his opponent." In short, be seems to have been what Goethe called "a beautiful soul," more interesting and important in this aspect than in the rather too ambitious writings on the relations of religion and science, by which he is best known. As a matter of fact, his booklets, such as The Greatest Thing in the World, containing the very essence and heart of the creed of Christianity, appear to us more inherently valuable than The Ascent of Man or Natural Law in the Spiritual World.
Of the same spiritual texture with those booklets are most of the discourses contained in this volume. They are not controversial or dogmatic, they are not philosophical or learned, but they are studies in the religious life. After reading them one says that though their author may not have been the vigorous thinker his friends and admirers supposed him to be, he yet had a profound knowledge of the human heart, a very keen sense of its needs and aspira- tions, an adoration of ideal goodness, an insight into the meaning of Christ's message to the world which is not common. The facts of sin, human penitence, the will of God, the meaning of salvation, the permanent as distinguished from the transient in life, the need of a certain divine audacity, or, as Drummond calls it, "eccentricity," if we are to put the world and its secular spirit under our feet,—these are the themes of the discourses contained in this volume. It may be said of every one of them that, without entering on those controversial matters on which Christendom is still divided and which are not the essential things in Christianity, these earnest utterances of a pure and aspiring soul are of no small help in the guidance of our inner life. Can greater praise be given than to say that a new contribution has been made to the literature of the soul P Yet that can be said of Drummond's posthumous volume, and it is of more import- ance than any half-baked exposition of the vexed problem of science and religion.
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