Baxter's Second Innings

Baxter's Second Innings is a short devotional story by Henry Drummond, originally delivered as an address and then published as a small book in 1892. Drummond was a Scottish evangelical writer and a popular speaker on the British and American religious lecture circuit, and his method was often to take a small incident from ordinary life and turn it into a moral and spiritual illustration. Baxter's Second Innings is one of the most enduring examples of that method.

The story is set at a school cricket match. A boy named Baxter goes out to bat in the first innings, makes a small score, and returns to the pavilion disappointed in himself. The captain, who is also the school chaplain in the story, takes the boy aside and gives him a quiet talk about how the second innings is also coming and how a second chance is exactly what life keeps offering. The conversation is the heart of the piece. Drummond uses the cricket setting as a way into a longer moral about repentance and renewal, but the cricket is kept genuinely as cricket. The boys behave like boys, the match is described as a match, and the moral arises naturally from the situation rather than being imposed on it.

The address became very popular in late Victorian Britain and was reprinted many times. Schools used it for chapel reading. Boys' clubs used it. Drummond himself was always sympathetic to young people and his appeal at the universities of Edinburgh and elsewhere was partly that he treated young men with respect rather than condescension. Baxter's Second Innings has the warmth that ran through all his best work.

The book is short, perhaps fifty pages in the typical printing, and can be read in a single sitting. It is one of the easier introductions to Drummond's work and gives a clear sense of his combination of religious seriousness and ordinary practical sense. For readers who want more, the natural follow ons are The Greatest Thing in the World, his most famous short work, and Pax Vobiscum, another short devotional address. Together those three small books make up a representative selection of Drummond at his most accessible.