Evangelicals and Evolution: Henry Drummond, Herbert Spencer, and the Naturalisation of the Spiritual World

Abstract

On 6 September 1939 the ‘S.S. President Harding’ churned slowly across the North Atlantic on the last of its summer runs. Joseph Needham passed the time aboard as he had often done while awaiting the completion of a distillation or an incubation in the Cambridge Biochemical Laboratory: by preparing a book for press. Now, however, he sat forebodingly, awaiting a graver distillation from the waters, an incubus in the skies, as he put the finishing touches on the introductory essay for a new edition of a book entitledNatural Law in the Spiritual World. The author of this book was Henry Drummond, a Scottish evangelical worker who died in 1897. Needham, born three years later, was a Marxist embryologist and a practising Anglo-Catholic. Near the end of the essay Needham stressed what he took to be Drummond's belief that ‘much of the content of traditional Christian theology — “the laws of the spiritual world” — arise directly from what had preceded it in the highly organised realm of the psychological’.

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