the weak. His sick-room was, as I have said, a kind of temple, where one was made aware of the sacred beauty of a spirit that had triumphed over earth's sufferings and disappointments. "Here I am," he said to me on my last visit to him, in December, "here I am, getting kindness upon kindness from my friends, and giving nothing in return." Little did he suspect how much he gave his friends in an hour's talk from his air couch. His kindly humor never failed him. At Christmas, 1895, he sent his friends as a Christmas card a photograph of himself in a bath-chair, with these words written in pencil underneath: "The Descent of Man." In his pain and weariness a good story was a physical fillip; his sick-room became a sort of center for the receiving and distributing of stories. He looked forward to the recovery of strength and the resumption of work, but the end came suddenly, and on March nth one of the purest, brightest, and most lovable spirits that have ever gladdened God's world passed to
Such great offices as suit
The full-grown energies of Heaven.
In estimating Professor Drummond's influence as a spiritual teacher—it is as spiritual teacher, not as scientist or speculative thinker, that his chief work has been done—I single out one or two of the more obvious characteristics of his teaching. For one thing, there is "atmosphere" in his work. Much is said, and too much cannot be said, of the lucidity and beauty of his style. His style is the reflection of a lucid and beautiful spirit. His readers are made to feel that they are in the company of a man who breathes the pure air of that spiritual world which is the home of fair visions and noble thoughts. The restfulness of his spiritual aspiration is specially attractive. One can hear the panting of St. Augustine, and see the strained muscle of John Henry Newman, but in Professor Drummond one is reminded rather of the spiritual calm of the Early Ministry by the Sea of Galilee. Again, his work has the "note" of originality. This quality is reflected in his style; there is scarcely a hackneyed phrase in his pages. His readers may wish that he would look at his subject in more aspects than he does, but then they may be sure of this, that he has himself seen whatever aspect of the subject he handles. He reports what of the spiritual world he knows—not what other people have reported, or what his critics would like him to report. He is a seer, and his teaching is all the more valuable because he has resolutely refused to go beyond his own vision of truth. The onesidedness of his teaching—of which, not altogether without ground, complaint is made—is but the shadow cast by that originality which is a hundred-fold more effective for spiritual teaching than balanced views and rounded systems. Another characteristic of his teaching is its catholicity—its singular freedom from theological provincialism. He uses the language, not of the sects or schools, but of Christendom. He is as readily understood in Sweden and Germany as in Scotland and America. He had a wide experience of human life. He had traveled in nearly every country on the globe, and been in contact with all grades of civilization and culture. He had been a lecturer on science and a city missionary; he had been an African explorer and an itinerant evangelist; he had preached to the denizens of the slums and to the flower of the aristocracy of Britain; he had been the friend of workingmen and the companion of statesmen. A "citizen of the world" with so varied a knowledge of life could not well be provincial, but the catholicity of his teaching had its deepest root in an understanding of the spirit of Him in whom there is "neither Greek nor barbarian, bond nor free."
But more striking than all his teaching was the personality of the teacher. The character of Henry Drummond has been a great gift of God to our generation. All unconsciously he has himself given us the truest sketch of his character we are ever likely to have. His booklet "The Greatest Thing in the World "—an exposition of St. Paul's great hymn in praise of love in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians—has been taken more warmly to the heart of Christendom than any other religious book of recent years. It is a singularly beautiful filling in of St. Paul's outline of the Christian character. As those of us who knew what manner of man the writer had been amid the strain and stress of the world's work and temptation read the pages of his booklet, we turned instinctively to his own life as the best commentary on his words. Some of us can never read St. Paul's immortal chapter without recalling "The Greatest Thing in the World," and can never read "The Greatest Thing in the World" without recalling how the love there described with a felicity of language as remarkable as the spiritual glow of the teaching, irradiated his own personality and life.
