. There
was a generation between them and a school, and to that you had to add
every set and cast of mind and body that can make men different. Dr
Drummond, in faith and practice, moved with precision along formal and
implicit lines; his orbit was established, and his operation within
it as unquestionable as the simplest exhibit of nature. He took in a
wonderful degree the stamp of the teaching of his adolescent period; not
a line was missing nor a precept; nor was the mould defaced by a single
wavering tendency of later date. Religious doctrine was to him a thing
for ever accomplished, to be accepted or rejected as a whole. He taught
eternal punishment and retribution, reconciling both with Divine love
and mercy; he liked to defeat the infidel with the crashing question,
"Who then was the architect of the Universe?" The celebrated among such
persons he pursued to their deathbeds; Voltaire and Rousseau owed their
reputation, with many persons in Knox Church, to their last moments and
to Dr Drummond. He had a triumphant invective which drew the mind from
chasms in logic, and a tender sense of poetic beauty which drew it, when
he quoted great lines, from everything else. He loved the euphony of the
Old Testament; his sonorous delivery would lift a chapter from Isaiah to
the height of ritual, and every Psalm he read was a Magnificat whether
he would or no. The warrior in him was happy among the Princes of
Issachar; and the parallels he would find for modern events in the
annals of Judah and of Israel were astounding. Yet he kept a sharp eye
upon the daily paper, and his reference to current events would often
give his listeners an audacious sense of up-to-dateness which might have
been easily discounted by the argument they illustrated. The survivors
of a convulsion of nature, for instance, might have learned from his
lips the cause and kind of their disaster traced back forcibly to
local acquiescence in iniquity, and drawn unflinchingly from the text,
"Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." The militant history
of his Church was a passion with him; if ever he had to countenance
canonization he would have led off with Jenny Geddes. "A tremendous
Presbyterian" they called him in the town. To hear him give out a single
psalm, and sing it with his people, would convince anybody of that.
There was a choir, of course, but to the front pews, at all events, Dr
Drummond's leading was more important than the choir's. It wa