Excerpt from The Hibbert Journal, Vol. 17: October 1918 July 1919

James Drummond was but twenty-four years of age when, after a brilliant career as a student, first at Trinity College Dublin, and later at Manchester New College (then in London, with John James Tayler as its Principal and James Martineau in its chair of Philosophy), he was called in 1859 to be the colleague of William Gaskell a beloved and sweet-souled man, as he described him) at Cross Street Chapel, Manchester. Mrs Gaskell was then at the height of her literary fame; Mary Barton, that pathetic story of Green Heys and Ancoats, Rut/z, Cranford, and the Life of Charlotte Bronte had all been published; and in the troublous days of the Cotton Famine she and her husband were mainly occupied in organising methods of relief - the one topic, as she writes in one of her letters, which was literally haunting us in our sleep, as well as being the first thoughts in wakening and the last at night.

The problems of the time were such as to draw forth the latent energy of the young Irish preacher; and often have I heard from the lips of Manchester citizens of the wondrous force and penetration and rich eloquence of James Drummond's early sermons. He spoke, so one of them has recently said, as one rapt into the very presence of divine things and able from that vantage-ground to see into the depths and lay bare the secrets of all the souls before him. Some of the fruits of that ministry are happily preserved in the volume entitled Spiritual Religion - assuredly one of the most beautiful series of devotional utterances in our own or in any language. The book is addressed to that increasing class of men, who, while profoundly conscious of a spiritual power in Christianity, are yet unable to accept any of the current representations of it and, as contrasted with appeals to an external authority or to a miraculous revelation, presents a noble plea for the reality of religious experience as an actual fact m human consciousness, bearing its own guarantee no less convincingly than the experi ence of visible objects bears to their presence and reality.

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