George MacDonald, Scottish novelist and poet

[MargaretAnne]

Here's a quote from George MacDonald's book "Donal Grant" (Chapter I):

To know God as the beginning and end, the root and cause, the giver, the enabler, the love and joy and perfect good, is life; and faith in its truest, simplest, mightiest form is to to do His will in the one thing revealing itself at the moment, as duty.

Another edition of the same quote found in another source:

To know God as the beginning and end, the root and cause, the giver, the enabler, the love and joy and perfect good, the present one existence in all things and degrees and conditions, is life; and faith, in its simplest, truest mightiest form is--to do His will.

Also from George MacDonald:

Never wait for fitter time or place to talk to Him. To wait till thou go to church or to thy closet is to make Him wait. He will listen as thou walkest.

Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was is evil dead.

[MargaretAnne]

George MacDonald, Scotland's Beloved Storyteller, is a biography written by Michael R. Phillips, one of the true MacDonald experts in the country. Michael R. Phillips, editor of the highly successful Bethany House Publishers George MacDonald Classic Series, is a bestselling novelist in his own right coauthoring The Stonewycke Trilogy, The Stonewycke Legacy, and The Highland Collection as well as other nonfiction books. Phillips' research includes years of reading and editing MacDonald's novels, vast research of any material relating to George MacDonald, and a visit to MacDonald's Scottish home and other signiicant places from his life.

This is an excerpt from Chapter Six, The Passing of Innocence, quoting from George MacDonald's book, Robert Falconer:

But even this rigid atmosphere could not keep God out of the boy.

One Saturday in the end of July, when the westering sun was hotter than at midday, he went down to the lower end of the field, where the river was confined by a dam, and plunged from the bank into the deep water. After a swim of half-an-hour, he ascended the higher part of the field, and lay down upon a broad web to bask in the sun. In his ears was the hush rather than rush of the water over the dam, the occasional murmur of a belt of trees that skirted the border of the field....

He lay gazing up into the depth of the sky, rendered deeper and bluer by the masses of white cloud that hung almost motionless below it, until he felt a kind of bodily fear lest he should fall off the face of the round earth into the abyss. A gentle wind, laden with pine odours from the sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its light wing in his face: the humanity of the world smote his heart; the great sky towered up over him, and its divinity entered his soul; a strange longing after something 'he knew not nor could name' awoke within him, followed by the pang of a sudden fear that there was no such thing as that which he sought, that it was all a fancy of his own spirit...But once aroused, the feeling was never stilled; the desire never left him; sometimes growing even to a passion that was relieved only by a flood of tears.

Strange as it may sound to those who have never thought of such things save in connection with Sundays and Bibles and churches and sermons, that which was now working in...[his] mind was the first dull and faint movement of the greatest need that the human heart possesses--the need of the God-Man. There must be truth in the scent of that pinewood: someone must mean it. There must be a glory in those heavens that depends not upon our imagination: some power greater than they must dwell in them. Some spirit must move in that wind that haunts us with a kind of human sorrow; some soul must look up to us from the eye of that starry flower....

Little did Robert think that such was his need--that his soul was searching after One whose form was constantly presented to him, but as constantly obscured and made unlovely by the words without knowledge spoken in the religious assemblies of the land; that he was longing without knowing it on the Saturday for that from which on the Sunday he would be repelled without knowing it. Years passed before he drew nigh to the knowlege of what he sought.

For weeks the mood...did not return, though the forms of Nature were henceforth full of a pleasure he had never known before. He loved the grass; the water was more gracious to him; he would leave his bed early, that he might gaze on the clouds of the east, with their borders gold-blasted with sunrise; he would linger in the fields that the amber and purple, and green and red, of the sunset, might not escape after the sun unseen. And as long as he felt the mystery, the revelation of the mystery lay before and not behind him. (Robert Falconer, Ch. 18).

This is a good example of the heart and mind of George MacDonald.

[MargaretAnne]

I'm providing links to four sermons from Unspoken Sermons (available in three volumes) by George MacDonald from a website that contains many of his works.

Unspoken Sermons, Vol. I was published in 1867. MacDonald's doubting, non-Christian friend, English author and critic John Ruskin said:

"They are the best sermons--beyond all compare--I have ever read, and if ever sermons did good, these will...very beautiful--unspeakably beautiful. If they were but true...But I feel so strongly that it is only the image of your own mind that you see in the sky!"

You can view the other sermons by clicking on the narrow, brown navigation bar at the very top and towards the bottom of the document. There are arrows as well as a TOC (Table of Contents):

The Truth

Justice

The Truth in Jesus


The New Name

www.ccel.org/ccel/macdonald/unspoken.html
www.ccel.org/ccel/macdonald/unspoken.i.html

[MargaretAnne]

In Chapter 17 of George MacDonald, Scotland's Beloved Storyteller, it is noted that he wrestled with difficult scriptures:

"Hell, rather than representing an everlasting punishment for earthly sins, was to MacDonald the final and most inescapable means of God's drawing all men to repentance and thus to himself, as He promised to do--an extension into the next life of God's loving redemptive plan (John 12:32). The Psalmist confidently proclaims that God's presence exists even in hell, verifying to him that hell was an intrinsic part of the redemptive process, for where God is, there is love--"If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou are there" (Psalm 139:8).

In some Bible translations, the word "sheol" is substituted for hell in this passage. It seems that there are varying interpretations in regards to whether sheol and hell are one and the same. I've read in one place that sheol means the grave. I saw notes in a Schofield Reference Bible about this particular verse and it seemed to suggest that one couldn't just change from one state to another. Do you have any thoughts about this?

[MargaretAnne]

It is evident from George MacDonald's fantasy novels and other writings that he loved science, too. Here is an excerpt from "Mathematics, Science, and George MacDonald":

So far all of the evidence in this essay has shown that MacDonald had a deep appreciation for mathematics and science. However, there are a number of indications that he had reservations about the value of each. While he was still a college student he wrote to his father, "I am in some doubts whether or not I should study Chemistry." (Raeper, p. 46) And later, he wrote, "What a mercy I was not allowed to follow out Chemistry!" (Greville, p. 108) He "worried that the study of science would damage his ability to write poetry." (Raeper, p. 46)

Although he appreciated the role of imagination in science, he seemed to consider it to be inferior to its role in poetry. "In the scientific region of her duty of which we speak, the Imagination cannot have her perfect work; this belongs to another and higher sphere than that of intellectual truth - that, namely, of full-globed humanity, operating in which she gives birth to poetry - truth in beauty." (Dish of Orts, p. 14-5) In contrasting Science with Nature, he wrote, "I would not be supposed to depreciate the labors of science, but I say its discoveries are unspeakably less precious than the merest gift of Nature, those which, from morning to night, we take unthinking from her hands." (Unspoken Sermons, p. 197) "Let a man go to the hillside and let the brook sing to him till he loves it, and he will find himself far nearer the fountain of truth than the triumphal car of the chemist will ever lead the shouting crew of his half-comprehending followers." (Unspoken Sermons, p. 69)

www.acmsonline.org/journal/2004/Neuhouser-MacDonald.pdf

George MacDonald lost two of his eleven children to tuberculosis, a daughter at age 24 and a son at age 15.

Quoting from the biography, George MacDonald, Scotland's Beloved Storyteller:

In two of his books, written in this period of heartache, he clarifies the faith that cannot be sustained only on an intellectual level, speaking to himself as well:

"To make things real to us, is the end and battle-cause of life. We often think we believe what we are only presenting to our imaginations. The least thing can overthrow that kind of faith. The imagination is an endless help toward faith, but it is no more faith than a dream of food will make us strong for the next day's work. To know God as the beginning and end, the root and cause, the giver, the enabler, the love and joy and perfect good, the present one existence in all things and degrees and conditions, is life. And faith, in its simplest, truest, mightiest form, is--to do his will in the one thing revealing itself at the moment as duty. The faith that works miracles is an inferior faith to this--and not what the old theologians call a saving faith" (Donal Grant, Ch. 1).

He then goes on to affirm there is a deeper way of knowing than by the intellect. "A man may look another in the face for a hundred years and not know him. Men have looked Jesus Christ in the face, and not known either him or his father....Do you ask why no intellectual proof is to be had? I tell you that such would but delay, perhaps altogether impair for you, that better, that best, that only vision, into which at last your world must blossom--such a contact, namely, with the heart of God himself...as, by its own radiance, will sweep doubt away forever. Being then in the light and knowing it, the lack of intellectual proof concerning that which is too high for it will trouble you no more than would your inability to silence a metaphysician who declared that you had no real existence. It is for the sake of such a vision as God would give you that you are denied such a vision as you would have. The Father of our spirits is not content that we should know him as we now know each other. There is a better, closer, nearer than any human way of knowing, and to that he is guiding us across all the swamps of our unteachableness, the seas of our faithlessness, the deserts of our ignorance....The mists and the storms and the cold will pass--the sun and the sky are forevermore" (Paul Faber, Surgeon, Ch. 32).

[MargaretAnne]

George MacDonald did not fear periods of doubt. In fact, he thought doubt strengthened one's faith.

Whether or not he could affix a certain moment to the awakening, conversion, or solidification of a confused but real faith, by the time George MacDonald left the university in 1845 he had emerged from the tunnel of his doubts, recognizing the importance of those doubts in the process of formulating his eventual faith--another lifelong truth he stressed in his writings.

He wrote a lengthy poem, The Disciple. In the biography, it is said that the final words of this poem in one sense reveal the underlying significance of his entire time at King's College, Aberdeen:

"The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,
In that fear doubteth thee."

Some find it sufficient to accept what they have been taught without question. But often such acceptance is not faith at all but rather a dull, sleepy acquiescence, which finds it easier to submit a certain precept than to inquire whether it be true. For George MacDonald, however, the validity of a thing was not measured by the number who happened to believe it, nor by what criticism he may have come under by questioning it, but rather by whether or not it rang true to the character of God as revealed in the New Testament.

Thus we find The Disciple reflective of his journey "out" of the tradition of his past, and "into" a new and personal faith of his own. Having ridden the swinging pendulum from the rigid confines of Calvinism all the way in the opposite direction toward liberal German theology, he was at last ready for it to swing back and come to rest in the solid biblical middle ground where he could take his stand. The earlier doubts and explorations of his seeking heart had strengthened him and, having been tested to the depths, his new faith was at last ready to send its roots down toward the bedrock from whence it could never again be shaken. The dedication to the poem speaks of the search to find the truth amidst the traditions that surround it: "To all who...would keep the grain, and cast the husk away--that it may feed the living seed..."

[MargaretAnne]

From George MacDonald, Scotland's Beloved Storyteller:

Through a particularly stern Calvinistic corner of Scottish "Dissention" George MacDonald entered this 19th century milieu, and shortly after the middle of the century began to alter it. As noted by Wolff, there were unbelievable numbers of books written espousing every conceivable doctrine and personal point of view that were eagerly devoured by the public. MacDonald was a man--given his background, his rebellion against the religious views of his upbringing, his cutting intellectual mind, his education, his interest in Darwin, his love for the latest scientific developments, and his poetic and mystical bent--who might have been likely to jump off some deep end or another in search of his own personal obsession and destiny, which he would then foist off on a gullible public.

But George MacDonald's revolutionary, spiritual and moral extremism were of an altogether different kind than what might have been expected--certainly different than others of his day who, like him, were rising up against the attitudes they felt needed to be restructured. A revolutionary he certainly was in the closely guarded circles of dissenting Calvinist theology. And his chief influence was exerted at the fundamental Calvinist end of Victorian Britain's religious spectrum, where he had the profoundest impact. Yet at the same time, he would hardly have been viewed as fanatical at the High Church/Catholic end of the spectrum where progressivism reined, where Unitarianism flourished, and where science and religion were able to meet and even occasionally hold business together. As Louise Wilcox said as early as 1906, and is even more true today as the leftward swing of the religious pendulum has continued: "He was to his own age shockingly liberal, and to ours he is amazingly orothodox."

That could be said of him even within his own lifetime. He remained tolerant toward Catholics, unprejudiced toward Calvinists, fiercely denouncing hypocrisy wherever he saw it, clinging to any doctrine he felt was true no matter how ancient and traditional. He based his life and his hope on the person of Jesus Christ as revealed in the gospel; never afraid to probe the previously unexplored, avoiding no taboos, friend of Unitarians and atheists and Calvinists alike, he gave himself and his life's work to that great middle or "common ground," which is always to be found in the center of Christendom and which is defined by how one practically lives one's faith. Thus his writings and his person can be viewed either as incendiary in their progressive ecumenicalism, or positively fundamental in their adherence to so many of the traditional reformed Protestant traditions.

But in one thing he was, if not revolutionary, certainly unique: he remained open to all, no matter what their positions. He often said he never met a person he could not learn from. Thus, while others were busy unloading their many viewpoints onto a receptive public, George MacDonald was engaged at an altogether different level. He was busy calling men to what Richard Foster has termed "the authenticity of simplicity, the spirit of prayer, and the life of obedience": obedience to the lifestyle of Jesus Christ. His writings and ideas, therefore, have continued--silently, invisibly, unnoticed--through the years to engender a unity within the sweeping spectrum of the Christian body of believers. Because his primary concern was not to convince the world of his particular viewpoints, the seed of his broad, ever-growing, and tolerant faith has taken root and sprouted in the most unlikely places throughout the entire continuum of Christendom, drawing people together in a common unity based on the very principle which was the guiding force of MacDonald's own existence: that life with God is to be lived in relationship with Him and one's fellow man, not doctrinalized.

From a spiritual perspective, George MacDonald's significance lies not in the liberal or the fundamental pigeon-hole we may ascribe to him, but rather in the concept of God's character he portrayed in his writings. Perhaps as we read his words today, much does not sound particularly revolutionary. But what made him distinctive in his day was the context from which he emerged. He came out of a misapplied Calvinism, where God's wrath was supreme, to proclaim a God of an altogether different disposition. In doing so he became neither a liberal nor a skeptic. For the God of MacDonald's pen was infinitely more personal and demanding than any vague liberal deity, more human and warm and tolerant than Calvin's harsh heavenly taskmaster.

Therefore, MacDonald was pivotal in the annals of both literature and Christian thought. He was not the first to rebel against the stern legalism that held Scotland in its grip. His more famous countrymen Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and Robert Burns (1759-1796) were both raised in the strictest of religious homes, Carlyle's father intending his son for the ministry. Like MacDonald, they too rebelled. But their rebellion was characterized by a complete rejection of fundamental Christian values--Carlyle through the criticism found in his writings, Burns through the self-indulgence of his life. Carlyle, too, read Novalis, but it turned him toward transcendentalism and away from the personal element of faith, while it turned George MacDonald toward personal aspects of God's character. MacDonald's good friend John Ruskin (1819-1900) was another noted English author who was raised for the ministry, but then rejected the faith of his childhood, never to return to it despite his intimacy with the MacDonalds.

George MacDonald was exceptional in being able to disengage himself so completely from the chains of heavy puritanical legalism that he could go forward into genuine Christian truth, which found outlets in many diverse forms--novels, fairy tales, sermons, essays, lectures, and fantasy stories. No Burns or Carlyle or Ruskin, coming out of the Calvinist end, could do so. Neither could any John Henry Newman at the other end of the spectrum. The critics criticized, the skeptics charted their own secular course, the scientists dispensed with religion altogether, the Calvinists entrenched themselves behind the locked doors of their doctrines, and the liberals looked down on the fundamentalists as unenlightened. Though some could perceive issues clearer than others, none of these could see to the end of the spectrum in the opposite direction. George MacDonald, however, embraced viewpoints and individuals from all of these camps. He actually had close friends who were Unitarians, befriended unbelievers, wrote admiringly of skeptics, respected his Calvinist father above all living men, was sympathetic with the doctrine of universal redemption while at the same time writing about the tormenting pains of the purifying hellfire, and refused to be boxed in at every point--appearing liberal one moment and conservative and traditional the next. Thus he found that foundational bedrock underlying Christianity--a middle ground based not on doctrine at all but upon obedience, a middle ground so urgently needed and yet so hard to maintain among Christians who are more interested in discussing their disagreements than what they hold in common.

[MargaretAnne]

Here is another sermon by George MacDonald, preached in Brixton Congregational Church, June 1882:

Faith, the Proof of the Unseen

[MargaretAnne]

Below is a link to the Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Volume 2. It is divided into nine parts. Part 1 lists the contents showing all the titles. Scroll down until you come to the first poem:

Poetical Morks - Volume 1
Poetical Works - Volume 2

[MargaretAnne]

Here are some book reviews from Amazon with some very interesting reviews from a few of George MacDonald's most famous works:

The Princess and the Goblin

Lilith

Phantastes