"How do men get bored?" he asked. "I never get bored. I can be interested in something always. Time never drags on my hands. But Jock and Sandy can't get interested unless they are making more money, so they keep at it all the time. They are lost without their occupation. Money is a fine thing—to use. If you have n't it, the man who has it uses you as well as his money. Can we find the way to make money without becoming its slaves, as almost all men are who make it?"
In the early nineties Henry Drummond was what they call "one of the best sellers." Who reads him now? I ask for information. If his books had been fiction, we could understand that the fashion had changed in twenty years. But has the fashion changed in God?
Youth used to follow Drummond in troops. When he died more than the youth of Scotland mourned. But youth does not mourn long. It has in that respect the advantage of age, which usually makes new friends only with difficulty; youth has but to summon them, and they come. Drummond had an immense capacity for friendship. I have said he had a way with youth; yes, of both sexes and all ages. But his greatest friends were young men; and his greatest friend of all was D. L. Moody, the revivalist.
Drummond was saying, as we sat before the fire, drawing clouds from churchwardens:
"I don't believe in old saws, do you? Now there 's:
"'Early to bed, and early to rise,
Make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.'
"What nonsense! Healthy, if you like, but how wealthy and how wise is the manual labourer?
"'Bed at dark,
Up with the lark.'
"Suppose you work with a night shift? Try bringing up a generation on these old wives' tales. But they 're merely an example of our British habit of trying to rule by phrases instead of by ideas."