Beautiful Thoughts

Beautiful Thoughts is a small devotional anthology drawn from the writings of Henry Drummond, the Scottish evangelical biologist who lived from 1851 to 1897. It was compiled and published after his death and is arranged as a daily reading book, with a short passage of his work for each day of the year. Drummond was a popular speaker and writer in the late Victorian period and his short addresses had reached an enormous audience by the time of his early death from cancer at the age of forty five.

The selections in the book are taken from across his work, including Natural Law in the Spiritual World, The Greatest Thing in the World, Pax Vobiscum, The Ideal Life, and various of his published sermons and lectures. The compiler has chosen passages that work on their own as short meditations, often of only a paragraph or two. The arrangement is loosely thematic across the year, with each season carrying its own colour. The summer pages tend toward the broader nature observations that drew on Drummond’s training in geology and biology, while the winter pages tend toward the more directly devotional material.

The book is a product of a particular Victorian and Edwardian tradition of daily reading anthologies, which used to be more common in family households than they are now. The form has its limitations. A passage taken out of its argument can sometimes lose its point. But Drummond’s writing happens to suit the anthology form unusually well, because he was always a writer of short paragraphs and sharp small observations rather than of long developed arguments. The selections work on their own, as the compiler clearly noticed.

The book runs about three hundred and seventy pages, one for each day of the year. For readers who already love Drummond, it is a way to keep his voice around in daily small doses. For readers new to him, it works as a sampler that points toward the longer works in his catalogue. It pairs naturally with similar daily reading anthologies of the period, particularly those drawn from the work of Phillips Brooks and George MacDonald, both of whom worked in a similar vein of late Victorian liberal Protestant devotion.