but even to large numbers of professing Christians, should turn out to be countenanced by the laws of science itself, there was here the possibility of an unexpected reconciliation of science and religion, and religion, too, in a somewhat exaggerated Calvinistic form. Mr. Drummond appealed to the gulf which separates the inorganic kingdom from the organic, in proof of the wideness of the gulf which separates the merely ethical life of man from the distinctively spiritual or Christian, and he appealed to the doctrine of biogenesis (that life can only come from life) in proof of the position that the distinctively spiritual life is a new creation let down suddenly into the natural ethical life. This is not the place to enter into a consideration of the validity of the arguments of "Natural Law." Mr. Drummond had himself ceased to attach much weight to the novelties in its teaching, by which many of its readers were attracted. He learned to appreciate better the deep affinities between the ethical and the spiritual life, and he also learned to appreciate better those elements of human personality, such as self-consciousness and volition, which make it impossible to interpret the moral and spiritual life of man by the help of nothing more than the categories of biological science.
But apart from its apologetic features, on which alone Mr. Drummond himself laid much stress, the book had extraordinary merits, both of style and of spiritual teaching, and deserved the popularity it speedily achieved. It was long, however, before the news of the sensation its publication created reached the author. Shortly after seeing it through the press he had started, at the request of a Glasgow merchant, on an exploring expedition into tropical Africa, the record of which is one of the most brilliant of books of travel. He has himself told us the strange circumstances in which he first heard of the reception of his volume. "For five months I never saw a letter nor a newspaper, and in my new work—I had gone to make a geological and botanical survey of this region—the book and its fate were alike forgotten. . . . I well remember when the first thunderbolt from the English critics penetrated my fastnesses. One night, an hour after midnight, my camp was suddenly roused by the apparition of three black messengers—despatched from the north end of Lake Nyassa by a friendly white—with the hollow skin of a tiger cat containing a small package of letters and papers. Lighting the lamp in my tent, I read the letters, and then turned over the newspapers—the first I had seen for many months. Among them was a copy of the 'Spectator' containing a review of 'Natural Law,' a review with criticism enough in it certainly to make one serious, but with that marvelous generosity and indulgence to an unknown author for which the 'Spectator' stands supreme in journalism."
PROFESSOR DRUMMOND AS A PREACHER.
The popularity of Professor Drummond on both sides of the Atlantic might well have turned the head of an ordinary man, but through it all he remained absolutely unspoiled, the same modest, unobtrusive friend as we knew him of old. His master passion was still evangelism. For years he was the unofficial preacher to the Edinburgh University in an unconsecrated building—the small, undignified Odd Fellows' Hall. He came from Glasgow for almost every Sunday during several winter sessions. There are scattered over the world to-day literally thousands of young men—ministers, doctors, teachers, lawyers, merchants—who owe the chief spiritual stimulus of their lives to these students' meetings. We have had great university preachers in our day and great university sermons, but no university preacher has done so much to quicken the spiritual life of a university as this unofficial preacher to the Edinburgh students, and no university sermons have gone home to the heart and inspired for service as his informal talks in the Odd Fellows' Hall.
Professor Drummond had qualifications for his work as Christ's evangelist to students. He believed in the glory and gladness of life; it was a wide, rich, and sunny life he lived himself. It was no gospel for ascetics he preached, but a gospel for youth with its genial energy and generous aspiration. It was no gospel for spiritual recluses, but for chivalrous youths eager to do some knightly service in the stout battle of life. His gospel was for the living present, and not merely for the dim and distant future. Salvation was the theme of his message, salvation, though, not as mere safety for the future, but as the saving of men's lives here and now, the winning of the true life of manhood—"a more abundant life, a life abundant in salvation for themselves and large in enterprise for the alleviation and redemption of the world."
A striking feature in Professor Drummond's career has been his hospitable atti-
