London Days Part 14

"They put me under gas and injected the spirit."

And with that we heard the clock strike the hour when we should start for the place where he was to lecture that evening on "The Greater Grat.i.tude."

Professor Drummond, in "Natural Law in the Spiritual World", had attempted, as a clerical and friendly critic said, "to treat religion as a fact of nature, no less solid and capable of scientific a.n.a.lysis than any other fact which science claims for its {174} own." Everybody read the book, for it was translated into all the European languages.

And everybody read its successor, "The Greatest Thing in the World."

The volumes, which were small, carried the name of their author around the globe in a large way, for they came from the press in tens of thousands. I suppose he had a million readers, and the most these knew about him was that he held the professorship of natural science in the Free Church College at Glasgow, that he was but little over thirty when he wrote the little books, and that, for a year, he had disappeared in the wilds of Africa. He returned to find himself famous, or as some thought and said, notorious.

He had fluttered the theologians, not flattered them. He was a theologian himself. His object was to stretch theology to man's size.

The champions of a hundred orthodoxies and heterodoxies chattered fiercely behind their bulwarks of texts. It seems a very small matter now, but, after all, it helped us all, for Drummond was a helpful man.

He was a young man's man, and there you have one of the keys to him.

To be a professor of anything in the Free Kirk College might imply that a man was hampered as to words and views. It was not so in Drummond's case, at any rate. I have said that he was a theologian; I will add that he was a geologist. When I knew him, he was famous and forty-two, and he had recently discovered in Glasgow the remains of a fossil forest. He had just returned from America, where he had been lecturing at the Lowell {175} Inst.i.tute, in Boston, on "The Evolution of Man."

How he laughed over his Boston surprise! Of course he knew the Lowell Inst.i.tute by name, but he had n't an idea of what it really was. He had supposed that he would have an audience of two or three dozen old fogies and a number of short-haired blue-stockings. He found the place crammed with alert human beings, mostly young, and all enthusiastic.

There was a greater crowd outside, hoping vainly to get in. His thought was, as he mounted the platform: "My lecture won't do. I must popularise it. There are no Dryasdusts here." He altered the lecture as he went along, and when he had finished, he returned to his hotel and undertook to rewrite all the lectures he had brought from Scotland.

There were no fogies in the throngs that heard him. He had already been two or three times to America; now he began to understand what it really was,--the country of the young.

Drummond lived at Number 3 Park Circus, Glasgow. He kept bachelor's hall there, and kept it very well, indeed. The house was s.p.a.cious, "rich not gaudy", the rooms set in carved woods and trophies of ivory, and everything about them suggesting comfort and agreeable taste. It did not in the least suggest the abiding place of a theologian, Scottish or otherwise, and it did not hint at the granite-like hardness of the houses of some geologists I have known. If I say that we had jolly evenings there, smoking churchwardens and talking of travel, the life of cities, and Scottish tales, and New England and Old England, and the Academy, and books, {176} and Gladstone, and Hyde Park, and the Rocky Mountains, it is only to show that theological-geologists can be human. Drummond was more than human; he was companionable. He had always the appearance of ease, but he was a persistent worker. Work never drove him, though; he held the reins over it and mastered it. If you had an appointment with him, the time was yours; he had set it apart; you were not made to feel that there was any pressure. This may seem a simple thing to do; but, as most men live, it is not.

Drummond's person was tall and slender; he had brown hair; his eyes were--shall I call them brownish-grey?--his moustache and short side whiskers inclined to a sandy tint; his voice was pleasing, and he shook hands with a hearty grip. He attracted you not so much by cordiality as by sincerity. He went to the point at once.

I was making a study of British munic.i.p.al policy and administration, with a view to certain movements in America. Drummond was helpful daily. He knew the things that had been done and the men who did them; he knew the practical fellows and the extremists; the men who worked at reforms and the men who merely talked about them; the originators and the copyists; the men who were out for politics and party, and the men who were out for the good they could do. And so I got at results and saved time and weariness, though not without much weariness and time.

Down narrow, grimy streets, piloted by Bailie This, or Bailie That, or Superintendent Thus and So, or Overseer of T'other, {177} I went by day and night through the densest, soul-rending parts of Glasgow; up twisting flights of stairs, through murky alleys and through atrocious smells; people were shovelled there to live as they could. At every little distance we would come to s.p.a.ces where old masonry was being levelled, and new bright buildings going up; lodging houses, tenements, model dwellings, bathhouses, feeding places, washing places, drying places, places where the sunlight and air could enter, could sweep about,--the munic.i.p.ality was overhauling things.

I would return to Drummond's, rid myself of the everlasting Scotch mist, have a bath, a nap, a change of clothing, and then tuck my knees under his mahogany, tell about what I 'd seen, and the drenching, fatiguing day, and, "as sure as eggs is eggs", his explanations would bring in Moody.

"That was Moody's doing," he would say; or "Moody started us," or "Moody collected the money to begin this work, or that," or "Moody showed us the way."

Moody was "the biggest man I ever knew," he said.

"Then why not talk of him?"

"I 'd like nothing better. Unless you knew him, and knew him at work, you could n't half appreciate him." I feared I never did. "Well, then, take him as a manager of men--" and there would begin a run of anecdote showing that the renowned evangelist was a great organiser, and would have been as great in the business world, or the political world, or the military world, had he chosen to enter, as {178} he had been in the hearts of Scotsmen, Englishmen, and Americans.

Moody had discovered Edinburgh, or Edinburgh had discovered Moody; I was never quite sure which. Anyhow, Moody made Drummond discover himself and his work in life, and that is the most important discovery a man can make. Drummond was a Scotsman of the Scots. He was born near the field of Bannockburn. He came of G.o.d-fearing folk, or as he preferred to say, G.o.d-loving. His father was a wealthy merchant, and meant that his boy should become a minister. But the boy took his theology without going in for orders. He made science his profession, and taught theology to scientists and science to theologians.

"I would never be wholly off with the one, nor wholly on with the other," said he. "I am fond of both. And I believed that I was better as a geologist and botanist than I could possibly be as a preacher."

When Moody and Sankey came to Scotland, the latter, with his keen capacity for selecting staff officers, selected Drummond as one of his.

Drummond shared two years of labour with the American revivalists.

They went through England, Scotland, Ireland. Then Moody and Sankey returned to America, and Drummond returned to his studies, religious and scientific, gained his professorship, taught his cla.s.ses, wrote his books, carried on evangelical work among young men, geologised in Malta, Africa, and the Rocky Mountains, and found this a good world to live in if you knew how to work.

We were reviewing his experiences one day. I said:

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"You have omitted to mention a great advantage that you started with and have kept."

"What's that?" he asked.

"Money. You never had to work for your living. You were free to indulge your bent, your theological-evangelical-scientific bent, free to help your soul and work for the souls of others, without having to think about bills, or grind your powers for the taskmaster, Debt!"

"Moody had n't a dollar when he began his work in Chicago," said Drummond. "See what he did!"

"Moody was a genius. He made a business success before he gave himself to religious work. He had proved his greatest power--the management of men. You or I would have had to grapple with theology, or geology, or to swim in ink, once we had started and had been left to ourselves."

"Perhaps."

"No doubt about it. A poor man can be a theologian, or a follower of science, but he can't be both, and explore the Rocky Mountains and Darkest Africa, and conduct soup kitchens in Glasgow, and do a two-years tour with Moody and Sankey."

"That aspect had n't occurred to me. I am glad I was not compelled to have it occur to me," said Drummond.

"A man needing money and unable to get it is like a machine without lubricating oil. Almost any man who has done much without money could have done more with it," I said.

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"You think so?"

"Are we to think that friction is the best result?"

"No," Drummond answered.

"Some men can't make money because their work does n't run to it, or they may have the ability, but not the desire, or they may not be able to afford to make money; you remember Aga.s.siz's case. Perhaps he did n't need it."

"Money-making is a special faculty," said Drummond. "A man has it or does n't have it, as he may or may not have a musical ear, an eye for colour, a delicate sense of smell, and so on. I know moneyed men, and I daresay you know others, who are duffers outside their special lines.

Most men are duffers outside their special lines."

"The defect of specialised training, eh?"

"Possibly: like over-specialisation in the trades."

"Cutting threads on screws for thirty years," said I.

"Shall we say the same thing of theology? Most men may overtrain in that."

"They do. Therefore try mixing science with it."

"That must dilute theology. A little too much science, and the theology becomes watery. But in the Roman Church they dilute the science."

"Don't you think it depressing to listen to Carnegie's cant about his intention to die poor?" I asked. "What else could he do? He says nothing about _living_ as a poor man. Poverty is a 'blessing' that we all recognise in essays, sermons, and speeches, but we use all the strength we can to avoid the blessing, and we don't delude the poor with our {181} pretences. All of us like to use money as a force.

Perhaps you would call it a mode of motion."

"That sounds like Moody," said Drummond. "There 's the other side," he went on, "the deadly monotony of the lives of the average rich folk, deadly monotony, a weary existence dragged along without any interest in useful things. Take an interest in things; that is the way to live; not merely think about them. No man has a right to postpone his life for the sake of his thoughts. This is a real world, not a think world.

Treat it as a real world--act!"

"That is from your 'Programme of Christianity'," said I.

"Yes. The might of those who build is greater than the might of those who r.e.t.a.r.d."