Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol II (1901).djvu/170

 (1888; 4th edit. 1891), describing the general character of the country and the condition of the natives, with one or two chapters upon the natural history and the economic problems that presented themselves to his mind. He returned by way of Cape Town in April 1884, and shortly after his return was promoted by the New Church to the status of a professor of theology. In November 1884 he was ordained in College Free Church, and delivered his inaugural address on 'The Contribution of Science to Christianity.' In May 1885, during the height of the London season, he gave three addresses in the ball-room of Grosvenor House on the subject of conversion, and then with undamped ardour he conducted a short mission at Oxford. While there he had a 'very sad' tête-à-tête dinner with Jowett. 'We were entirely alone and had a good talk, also occasional silences. He asked me if in Scotland we were now generally giving up belief in miracles—he meant as a sign of progress.' He was strongly but vainly urged by Gladstone to contest the Partick division of Lanarkshire in 1886; he had before this thrown himself heart and soul into a students' mission, mainly in connection with the large medical classes at Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1887 he made a tour of the American colleges with similar aims in view, and there is a strong testimony to the substantial good that he wrought by his influence over young men. In 1890 he made a round of the Australian colleges, and visited the New Hebrides, where he was confirmed in the high views he had formed in Africa as to the beneficence of missionaries. On returning to Park Circus, Glasgow, he had an invitation to deliver the Lowell lectures for 1893 at Boston, in America, and he determined to work up his papers on 'Christian Evolution' for this purpose. To the new series he gave the name of 'The Ascent of Man,' and when he delivered the lectures aroused the most vivid interest. The title was not new, having been applied to an epic by Mathilde Blind in 1889. The lectures were published in 1894 as 'The Ascent of Man,' and the book had all the external qualities of his previous work, the lucid style, the power and charm of illustration, and the happy phrases. Drummond's adroitness in rehandling old arguments was truly remarkable, but his general thesis that the struggle for life gradually became altruistic in character, or 'struggle for the life of others,' and that 'the object of evolution is love,' was very severely criticised by men of science, while some of his attempts to qualify the apparent harshness of the scheme of natural selection, by such phrases as 'With exceptions, the fight is a fair fight. As a rule there is no hate in it, but only hunger,' or 'It is better to be eaten than not to be at all,' must appear to be perilously near the grotesque. At the same time Drummond was attacked by many theologians on account of his too close adherence to Darwin and Herbert Spencer. With the publication of 'The Ascent of Man' Drummond's career as a public teacher virtually ended, and though he still took a very keen interest in evangelical work, and especially in the boys' brigade at Glasgow, founded in 1885, he was soon to be prostrated by a painful and abnormal malady, produced by a malignant growth of the bones. In 1895 he travelled to Biarritz and Dax, and was then taken to Tunbridge Wells, where he died unmarried on 11 March 1897. He was buried in Greyfriars churchyard, Stirling.

Drummond was great as a teacher, much less by his books, good though his writing was, than by his life and example. His influence upon young men was of the most vivid kind, and the impulse that he gave to the higher life among the students at Edinburgh University was perhaps his finest achievement. There are two portraits in the 'Life of Henry Drummond' by George Adam Smith.

 DRUMMOND-HAY, JOHN HAY (1816–1893), diplomatist, third son of Edward William Auriol Drummond-Hay (d. 1845), nephew of the ninth earl of Kinnoul, was born on 1 June 1816 at Valenciennes, where his father was major on Lord Lynedoch's staff in the army of occupation in France; afterwards he was Lord-Lyon clerk at Edinburgh, where he knew Sir Walter Scott, Cockburn, and others, and in 1829 he became consul-general of Morocco. His mother was Louisa Margaret, daughter of John Thomason, deputy commissary-general.

He was educated at the Charterhouse from 1827 to 1832, when he joined his father at Tangier; he entered the diplomatic service as attaché under Ponsonby and afterwards Stratford Canning at Constantinople in 1840,