The Monkey That Would Not Kill

The Monkey That Would Not Kill is a short illustrated book by Henry Drummond, published posthumously in 1898. Drummond, the Scottish evangelical writer and biologist best known for Natural Law in the Spiritual World and The Greatest Thing in the World, was a popular speaker who often used animal stories as illustrations for his moral and religious points. This small book collects some of those stories and presents them in a form aimed partly at children and partly at the wider devotional reader.

The central story gives the book its title. A monkey is the subject of various attempts at violence in a sequence of comic anecdotes, all of which the monkey survives by a mixture of luck and quick thinking. The point Drummond was making in his original lectures was a moral one about the resilience of certain spiritual qualities, but in the book form the comic surface of the stories is also enjoyable in its own right. The other stories in the book are similar in tone, mixing anecdotes from natural history with brief moral applications.

Drummond had been a popular figure on the British and American lecture circuit in the 1880s and 1890s. His method was to take examples from natural science and use them as illustrations for Christian moral and devotional points, in a way that was unusual for the period and that drew large audiences. He thought the apparent conflict between religion and the new evolutionary science was overstated and that nature could be read as supporting moral truth rather than as undermining it. The little stories in this book are part of that larger project.

The book is short, perhaps a hundred pages, and is meant to be read quickly. It is one of the lighter pieces of Drummond’s posthumous publications. For readers interested in late Victorian devotional literature aimed at general audiences, this is one of the more enjoyable examples. It pairs naturally with The Ideal Life and with Beautiful Thoughts, two other Drummond collections that have stayed in print as devotional reading.