The Greatest Thing

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.  Hence eternal life is inextricably bound up with love.  We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live tomorrow.  Why do you want to live tomorrow?  It is because there is someone who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and to be with, and to love back.  There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved.  No worse fate can befall a man in this world that to live and grow old alone, unloving and unloved.  To be lost is to live in an unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God, for God is love.[1]

---

[1] This is a selection from The Greatest Thing in the World, an address by Henry Drummond. Drummond (1851-1897) was educated at Edinburgh University, where he displayed a strong inclination for physical and mathematical science. The religious element was an even more powerful factor in his nature, and disposed him to enter the Free Church of Scotland. While preparing for the ministry, he became for a time deeply interested in the evangelizing mission of Moody and Sankey, in which he actively cooperated for two years. In 1877 he became lecturer on natural science in the Free Church College, which enabled him to combine all the pursuits for which he felt a vocation. His studies resulted in his writing Natural Law in the Spiritual World, the argument of which was that the scientific principle of continuity extended from the physical world to the spiritual. Before the book issued from the press (1883), a sudden invitation from the African Lakes Company drew Drummond away to Central Africa.

Returning the next year, Henry found himself famous. Many serious readers, alike among the religious and the scientific classes, discovered in Natural Law the common standing-ground which they needed; and the universality of the demand proved, if nothing more, the seasonableness of its publication. Drummond continued to be actively interested in missionary and other movements among the Free Church students. In 1888 he published Tropical Africa, a valuable digest of information. In 1890 he traveled in Australia, and in 1893 delivered the Lowell Lectures at Boston. An attempted piracy compelled him to hasten their publication, and they appeared in 1894 under the title of The Ascent of Man. Drummond’s health failed shortly afterwards; he died in 1897.  (Source: Christian Classics Ethereal Library – ccel.org)