Henry Drummond

Henry Drummond FRSE FGS (17 August 1851 – 11 March 1897) was a Scottish evangelist, biologist, writer and lecturer.

Many of his writings were too adapted to the needs of his own day to justify the expectation that they would long survive it. His sermon "The Greatest Thing in the World" remains popular in Christian circles.

Early life Drummond was born at Park Place in Stirling, his father Henry Drummond (1809-1888) and his mother, Jane Campbell Blackwood (d.1910) Henry being the grandson of William Drummond (d.1888) a seedsman and founder of Drummond Seeds. His early education was at Stirling High School and Morrison's Academy.

Drummond was educated at Edinburgh University, where he displayed a strong inclination for physical and mathematical science. The religious element was an even more powerful factor in his nature, and he entered the Free Church of Scotland. While preparing for the ministry, he became for a time deeply interested in the evangelizing mission of D.L. Moody and I.D. Sankey, where he was active for two years.

Career In 1877 he was lecturer on natural science in the Free Church College on Lynedoch Street in Glasgow, which enabled him to combine all the pursuits for which he felt a vocation. Drummond advocated for theistic evolution. His studies resulted in his writing Natural Law in the Spiritual World, the argument being that the scientific principle of continuity extends from the physical world to the spiritual. Before the book was published in 1883, an invitation from the African Lakes Company took Drummond to Central Africa. Large bodies of serious readers, among the religious and the scientific classes alike, discovered in Natural Law the common ground they needed; and the universality of the demand proved, if nothing more, the seasonableness of its publication. Drummond continued to be actively interested in missionary and other movements among the Free Church students. In 1890 he travelled in Australia, and in 1893 delivered the Lowell Lectures in Boston. He had meant to keep them aside for mature revision, but an attempted piracy compelled him to hasten their publication, and they appeared in 1894 under the title of The Ascent of Man. Their object was to ratify altruism or, the disinterested care and compassion of animals for each other, important in effecting the survival of the fittest, a thesis previously maintained by philosopher professor John Fiske.

Death Drummond's health failed shortly after The Ascent of Man.

Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) Tropical Africa (1888) The Greatest Thing in the World: an Address (1890) The Greatest Thing in the World: and Other Addresses (1891) The Ascent of Man (1894) The Eternal Life (1896) The Ideal Life and Other Unpublished Addresses (1897) The Monkey That Would Not Kill (1898) The New Evangelism and Other Papers (1899)