Henry Drummond

I walked to the shelf this morning and pulled off the book "Henry Drummond's addresses". My favorite essay was "The greatest thing in the world." It is a great essay where he describes love as the greatest thing in the world. He lists the 9 elements of love as patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, good temper, guilelessness and sincerity. How different the world would be if we all practiced that kind of love.

And then I flipped to the end of the book and found another address titled "A talk on books." And this being a library and all, I proceeded to read it. He shares about authors who enabled him to see the world differently : Ruskin, Emerson, George Eliot, Channing, and F. W. Robertson. And then he writes: "One day as I was looking over my mantelshelf library, it suddenly struck me that all these authors of mine were heretics - these were dangerous books. Undesignedly I had found stimulus and help from teachers who were not credited by orthodoxy. And I have since found that much of the good to be got from books is to be gained from authors often classed as dangerous, for these provoke inquiry, and exercise one's powers."

And another quote from him: "To fall in love with a good book is one of the greatest events that can befall us."

And yet another quote: "...and I think everyone owes it as a sacred duty to his mind to start a little library of his own."

Mr. Drummond also wrote "Natural law in the spiritual world." We have copies of both of these books in the Bullis Library.

Mr. A. R. Bullis (the surveyor) owned both of these books. I wonder what he gained from them. I wonder if this is where the idea of this family library came from. Hmmm....