A particular
importance attached to everything he said and did; he
was a person whose life answered different springs, and
was sustained on quite another principle than that of
supply and demand. The province of public criticism was
his; but his people made up for the meekness with which
they sat under it by a generous use of the corresponding
privilege in private. Comments upon the minister partook
of hardiness; it was as if the members were determined
to live up to the fact that the office-bearers could
reduce his salary if they liked. Needless to say, they
never did like. Congregations stood loyally by their
pastors, and discussion was strictly intramural. If the
Methodists handed theirs on at the end of three years
with a breath of relief, they exhaled it among themselves;
after all, for them it was a matter of luck. The
Presbyterians, as in the case of old Mr Jamesion of St
Andrew's, held on till death, pulling a long upper lip:
election was not a thing to be trifled with in heaven or
upon earth.
It will be imagined whether Dr Drummond did not see in
these conditions his natural and wholesome element,
whether he did not fit exactly in. The God he loved to
worship as Jehovah had made him a beneficent despot and
given him, as it were, a commission. If the temporal
power had charged him to rule an eastern province, he
would have brought much the same qualities to the task.
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