The Ideal Life

The Ideal Life is a posthumous collection of addresses by Henry Drummond, published in 1897 shortly after his death from cancer at the age of forty five. The collection was assembled by his friends and editors from addresses he had delivered during his years of active lecturing and from manuscript material he left behind. It is one of the larger Drummond collections and is the book most often recommended to readers who already love The Greatest Thing in the World and Pax Vobiscum and want more in the same vein.

The addresses gathered in the book cover the wide range of Drummond’s lecturing subjects. There are pieces on the spiritual life in general, on temptation and how to resist it, on the relations between religion and modern science, on the responsibilities of educated people in a society that was changing rapidly, and on the various practical questions that came up in his addresses to university audiences and to gatherings of young men in Britain and America. The longest and most central piece in the collection is the title address, which gives a more systematic account of Drummond’s vision of what a fully realised religious life looks like than any of the shorter addresses had attempted on their own.

Drummond’s method by this stage of his career was fully formed. He took a biblical or moral question, presented it in plain modern language, and worked through it with examples from natural science, ordinary daily experience, and his wide reading. He avoided the formal theological vocabulary that the older sermons of his period still used, and the result was a series of addresses that could be read by people far outside the conventional churchgoing audience. The Ideal Life shows him at his most ambitious in this method, with longer arguments and more sustained development than the shorter addresses had allowed.

The book runs about three hundred and fifty pages. It is best read in chapter sized pieces rather than straight through, since each address was originally meant to stand on its own. For readers who want to see Drummond at his fullest, this is the essential book. It pairs naturally with Natural Law in the Spiritual World, his longer scientific theological argument, and with The Greatest Thing in the World, his most famous short address.