Getting Your Hands on Henry Drummond's "The Greatest Thing In The World" Sermon
If you are looking for Henry Drummond The Greatest Thing In The World, you will find it everywhere. The sermon was first delivered at the Wesley Hall in London in 1892. It became one of the most printed and quoted sermons in the English language. Most modern copies circulate freely online. You do not need to buy a special edition to read it. I ran into this a few years ago when someone asked me where the original manuscript lived. I spent about forty minutes digging through library catalogs before remembering there is no single "original" manuscript people are looking for. The sermon exists in a handful of published versions that vary slightly depending on whether you grab it from the 1894 compilation or an earlier periodical reprint. The content does not change much between versions. But if you want the exact wording Drummond read that night, the Wesleyan Methodist Publishing House edition from around 1893 is the closest thing to what an audience actually heard.
Henry Drummond The Greatest Thing In The World - What It Actually Says
Drummond takes 1 Corinthians 13:13 — "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity" — and builds the entire sermon around the Greek word agape. He argues that faith and hope are transitional virtues. They serve a purpose but they do not last. Faith becomes sight. Hope becomes possession. Charity is the only one that transcends time. The logic is straightforward but the rhetorical delivery is what made it stick. One thing most readers miss is that Drummond was a scientist before he was a preacher. He taught natural science at the University of Glasgow. You can feel that background in the way he structures the argument. He does not start with theology. He starts with observable human experience and works his way upward. He lists things people consider great — wealth, fame, military conquest, artistic achievement — and then systematically undercuts each one. The sermon reads almost like a debate brief rather than a traditional pastoral address.
Where to Find and Download the Text
The sermon is in the public domain. That means you can download it from multiple sources without paying anything. Here are the places I actually use: Project Gutenberg has a clean HTML version and a plain text download. The text is accurate and free of transcription errors. That is important because some scanned PDFs from archive.org introduce OCR mistakes that change words. I once caught a version that said "love is the binding perfect bond" instead of "the bond of perfectness." Minor difference but it throws off anyone quoting it. Christian Classics Ethereal Library also hosts it with a slightly different formatting approach. The CCEL version preserves the paragraph breaks more faithfully. If you are doing any kind of serious analysis or citation work, that is the version to pull.
Get the Full Details
Archive.org has dozens of digitized book editions. Some are actual printings from the early twentieth century. These are useful if you want to see how the sermon was presented in its original physical form, including chapter headings and page layouts from specific publications. The text itself is identical across them. For a direct download link, go to Project Gutenberg and search for Drummond. The file is listed as etext96.htm. It is approximately twelve thousand words. Takes about twenty minutes to read straight through.
How People Actually Use This Sermon Today
It gets quoted constantly at weddings. That is the primary modern use case. Drummond himself would probably find that mildly reductive given the scope of his argument, but it is what it is. The sermon also circulates heavily in Christian education materials, Sunday school curricula, and men's group discussion guides. You will find it referenced in books about the history of evangelical preaching in Britain. I have also seen it used in secular contexts. Not often, but sometimes a speaker will pull the line about love being greater than faith and hope without any religious framing. It works because the logic stands on its own even when you strip away the scripture references. That is unusual for a sermon from this period and it is partly why it survived so long outside its original audience.
Problems With Common Versions You Should Know About
Not every online copy is equal. I have encountered at least three distinct variants floating around the internet. One omits the entire second half where Drummond discusses love as the defining characteristic of God. Another rearranges the order of his examples about human achievements. A third adds a subtitle that Drummond never used. These are not major issues if you are reading for personal reflection, but if you are citing this for a paper, a sermon, or any published work, you need to verify which text you are using. The workaround I use is simple. I always cross-reference with the CCEL version. If a quote matches there, it is probably reliable. If it does not, I check a second source before using it. I lost about an hour once to a version that had substituted "kindness" for "charity" in three key passages. The meaning barely shifted but it was technically inaccurate.
What Beginners Miss About the Text
Most people focus on the charity section and skip over Drummond's earlier deconstruction of worldly greatness. That is a mistake. The first half of the sermon does the heavy lifting. Without it, the conclusion feels earned but the argument is weaker. Drummond spends considerable time on what he calls "the greatest thing" according to different value systems — beauty, truth, power, pleasure — and shows how each one collapses under scrutiny. The section on scientific achievement is particularly sharp. He was writing as a man who had actually done science, not someone romanticizing it from the outside. Another thing people overlook is the structure. Drummond uses a repeating rhetorical pattern. He states a proposed "greatest thing," gives it its due, then shows its limitation. This is not accidental. It is the same structure he used in his popular science lectures. The sermon is effectively a science lecture wearing a clerical robe. Recognizing that makes the text more interesting than it first appears.
Limits of the Sermon
It is not a comprehensive theology of love. Drummond does not address the Greek distinctions between agape, philia, and eros in any detail. He treats charity as a single concept and moves on. If you are looking for a rigorous theological treatment of love, this is not the text. It is a persuasive essay, not a systematic work. It was never meant to be one. Reading it as if it were something it is not will lead to disappointment. The sermon also reflects its Victorian context in ways that are noticeable now. Some of his examples about women and domestic life read as dated. That does not undermine the core argument but it is worth being aware of if you are teaching or presenting this material to a modern audience. If you want a fuller exploration of the themes Drummond raises, pairing this with actual biblical exegesis of 1 Corinthians 13 will give you more depth. The sermon is a door, not a destination.
