Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement/Drummond, Henry (1851-1897)
DRUMMOND, HENRY (1851–1897), theological writer, born at Park Place, Stirling, on 17 Aug. 1851, was the second son of Henry Drummond (d. January 1888) by his wife Jane (Blackwood) of Kilmarnock, and grandson of William Drummond, a land surveyor, and afterwards a nurseryman at Coneypark, near Stirling. His father, who became head of the firm of William Drummond & Sons, seedsmen of Stirling and Dublin, was a strict disciplinarian, a powerful speaker, and a pillar of the Free North church; his uncle, Peter Drummond, was the founder of the Agricultural Museum in Stirling and of the Stirling Tract Enterprise. He was educated at Stirling High School (1856–63), and at Morison's, Crieff, before matriculating in 1866 at Edinburgh University, where he took classics under Sellar and English under Professor Masson, but he left the university without a degree. In 1868 he started a manuscript magazine, 'The Philomathic,' in which he expatiated upon animal magnetism and other topics. In 1870 he entered the divinity course of the Free church at New College, Edinburgh. In the summer of 1873 he spent a semester at Tübingen. In the autumn of the same year he was drawn into the evangelical revival initiated by Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey. From April 1874 to July 1875 he followed up the work of the evangelists in the cities of Ireland and England, and he laboured by their side in London. The bulk of his work was in the preparation and delivery of addresses. He grew to be very expert in the management of huge meetings, while in Moody's 'inquiry room' he had experience of all sorts and conditions of men.
The discourses in the volume called 'The Ideal Life' (published posthumously in 1897) were prepared about this time, as were all his widely known published addresses, 'The Greatest Thing in the World' and 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.' In spite of many invitations to conduct missions, and a pressing appeal for aid from Moody at Philadelphia, Drummond returned to New College, Edinburgh, in the autumn of 1875. Two years later he was appointed lecturer in natural science at the Free Church College, Glasgow. In 1879 he went to America with Professor (Sir) Archibald Geikie upon a geological expedition to the Rocky Mountains. After a flying visit to Moody at Cleveland, he returned to his Glasgow lecturing and to work in the Possilparts Workman's Mission, Glasgow, which he abandoned only in 1882 in order to assist Moody as an evangelist upon the occasion of his second visit to Britain.
In 1883 he published the book which contributed so largely to his contemporary fame, 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' In this he contended that the scientific principle of continuity extended from the physical universe to the spiritual world. The thesis was based upon a series of brilliant figures of speech rather than upon a chain of reasoning, and the fallacies in Drummond's argument were pointed out with clearness and acumen by Professor Denney and others. The book, however, proved amazingly successful; its popularity, due in the first instance to the beauty of the writing, was strengthened by a most enthusiastic review in the 'Spectator,' and within five years of the date of publication some seventy thousand copies were sold.
Within a few days of the publication he set out on a visit to the southern equatorial region of Africa. His commission was to make a scientific, and especially geological, exploration of the Lake Nyasa and Tanganyika district for the African Lakes Corporation. He sailed in June 1883 and went by way of Zanzibar and Mozambique. He brought back a valuable report on the great region which the corporation were administering, and he also kept a full journal, from which he extracted the materials for his admirably written sketch of 'Tropical Africa' (1888; 4th edit. 1891), describing the general character of the country and the condition of the natives, with one or two chapters upon the natural history and the economic problems that presented themselves to his mind. He returned by way of Cape Town in April 1884, and shortly after his return was promoted by the New Church to the status of a professor of theology. In November 1884 he was ordained in College Free Church, and delivered his inaugural address on 'The Contribution of Science to Christianity.' In May 1885, during the height of the London season, he gave three addresses in the ball-room of Grosvenor House on the subject of conversion, and then with undamped ardour he conducted a short mission at Oxford. While there he had a 'very sad' tête-à-tête dinner with Jowett. 'We were entirely alone and had a good talk, also occasional silences. He asked me if in Scotland we were now generally giving up belief in miracles—he meant as a sign of progress.' He was strongly but vainly urged by Gladstone to contest the Partick division of Lanarkshire in 1886; he had before this thrown himself heart and soul into a students' mission, mainly in connection with the large medical classes at Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1887 he made a tour of the American colleges with similar aims in view, and there is a strong testimony to the substantial good that he wrought by his influence over young men. In 1890 he made a round of the Australian colleges, and visited the New Hebrides, where he was confirmed in the high views he had formed in Africa as to the beneficence of missionaries. On returning to Park Circus, Glasgow, he had an invitation to deliver the Lowell lectures for 1893 at Boston, in America, and he determined to work up his papers on 'Christian Evolution' for this purpose. To the new series he gave the name of 'The Ascent of Man,' and when he delivered the lectures aroused the most vivid interest. The title was not new, having been applied to an epic by Mathilde Blind in 1889. The lectures were published in 1894 as 'The Ascent of Man,' and the book had all the external qualities of his previous work, the lucid style, the power and charm of illustration, and the happy phrases. Drummond's adroitness in rehandling old arguments was truly remarkable, but his general thesis that the struggle for life gradually became altruistic in character, or 'struggle for the life of others,' and that 'the object of evolution is love,' was very severely criticised by men of science, while some of his attempts to qualify the apparent harshness of the scheme of natural selection, by such phrases as 'With exceptions, the fight is a fair fight. As a rule there is no hate in it, but only hunger,' or 'It is better to be eaten than not to be at all,' must appear to be perilously near the grotesque. At the same time Drummond was attacked by many theologians on account of his too close adherence to Darwin and Herbert Spencer. With the publication of 'The Ascent of Man' Drummond's career as a public teacher virtually ended, and though he still took a very keen interest in evangelical work, and especially in the boys' brigade at Glasgow, founded in 1885, he was soon to be prostrated by a painful and abnormal malady, produced by a malignant growth of the bones. In 1895 he travelled to Biarritz and Dax, and was then taken to Tunbridge Wells, where he died unmarried on 11 March 1897. He was buried in Greyfriars churchyard, Stirling.
Drummond was great as a teacher, much less by his books, good though his writing was, than by his life and example. His influence upon young men was of the most vivid kind, and the impulse that he gave to the higher life among the students at Edinburgh University was perhaps his finest achievement. There are two portraits in the 'Life of Henry Drummond' by George Adam Smith.
[Smith's Life of Drummond, 1899; The Ideal Life, 1897, with Memorial Sketches by Dr. Robertson Nicoll and Ian Maclaren; Times, 12 March 1897; Guardian, 17 March 1897; North American Review, June 1897; R. A. Watson's Gospels of Yesterday: Drummond, Spencer, Arnold, 1898; Cecil's Pseudo-Philosophy, i. An Irrationalist Trio—Kidd, Drummond, Balfour, 1897.]