He taught eternal
punishment and retribution, reconciling both with Divine
love and mercy; he liked to defeat the infidel with the
crashing question, "Who then was the architect of the
Universe?" The celebrated among such persons he pursued
to their deathbeds; Voltaire and Rousseau owed their
reputation, with many persons in Knox Church, to their
last moments and to Dr Drummond. He had a triumphant
invective which drew the mind from chasms in logic, and
a tender sense of poetic beauty which drew it, when he
quoted great lines, from everything else. He loved the
euphony of the Old Testament; his sonorous delivery would
lift a chapter from Isaiah to the height of ritual, and
every Psalm he read was a Magnificat whether he would or
no. The warrior in him was happy among the Princes of
Issachar; and the parallels he would find for modern
events in the annals of Judah and of Israel were astounding.
Yet he kept a sharp eye upon the daily paper, and his
reference to current events would often give his listeners
an audacious sense of up-to-dateness which might have
been easily discounted by the argument they illustrated.
The survivors of a convulsion of nature, for instance,
might have learned from his lips the cause and kind of
their disaster traced back forcibly to local acquiescence
in iniquity, and drawn unflinchingly from the text,
"Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
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