Addresses

Addresses is a collection of religious addresses by Henry Drummond, the Scottish evangelical biologist and popular speaker. The book brings together various shorter pieces that Drummond delivered at different times during his lecture career and that had appeared separately in earlier printings. Drummond was one of the most successful religious speakers of the late Victorian period, drawing large audiences in Britain and America, and the various Addresses collections were continually reprinted in the years after his death in 1897.

The pieces included vary by edition but typically include The Greatest Thing in the World, his famous address on First Corinthians thirteen, Pax Vobiscum, his short address on inner peace, The Changed Life, an address on conversion delivered in 1893, and several other shorter pieces. The Greatest Thing in the World is the central piece of the collection and is the work that has kept Drummond’s name in print to this day. It is a sermon on the chapter that begins with the line about charity or love, and Drummond takes the chapter apart phrase by phrase and reassembles it as a practical and modern argument for love as the highest of the spiritual gifts.

Drummond’s method in all these addresses is consistent. He takes a biblical text, often a familiar one, and reads it in a fresh way that draws on his training in geology and biology and on his wide reading in literature. The tone is direct and personal. He does not preach in the older sense. He talks. The addresses sound like the work of an educated man speaking to other educated people about questions that matter to all of them. This was unusual for the religious speaking of the period and is what gave Drummond his particular appeal.

The book runs about two hundred pages and works as a single sitting read or as a sequence of evening pieces. For readers who want a single introduction to Drummond, the collected Addresses volume is the most efficient place to find the essential pieces gathered together. It pairs naturally with Natural Law in the Spiritual World, his longer book that argues for the same general position at greater length, and with The Ideal Life, the posthumous collection.