Justified True Belief

(●) The Scottish preacher who was pushed out of his only pulpit for making God sound too kind, and who spent the next fifty years saying it in stories instead. + On 4 March 1916 a seventeen-year-old atheist named Clive Staples Lewis picked up a grubby Everyman volume at the railway bookstall in Leatherhead, Surrey, one of those cheap cloth-bound reprints the railway bookstalls sold for a shilling, and a book he had looked at and put back a dozen times before. It was Phantastes, by a Scotsman eleven years in his grave. Lewis said afterwards that it converted, even baptized, his imagination, and that he knew within a few hours that he had crossed a great frontier. Fifteen more years passed before he believed a word of Christianity. When he finally came to write about his teachers, he put it plainly: he had never concealed that he regarded George MacDonald as his master. MacDonald is on a Christian apologetics site for that reason and for a second one. He is the man who gave the modern Christian imagination its shape, the link in the chain that runs from the Scottish Congregational chapels of the 1850s through Lewis and Tolkien to a hundred years of readers who never heard his name. And he is a case study in what happens when a preacher decides that the fatherhood of God is not a soft word tacked onto a hard doctrine but the hardest and gladdest fact there is, and follows it wherever it leads, including one or two places Scripture does not go. The signature fact about him is the shape of his working life. He held a settled pulpit for a little under three years, lost it, and never held another. He then preached, as a layman, for half a century: in rented rooms to Manchester working men, in the Nonconformist chapels of the English Protestants who stood outside the state church and in the parish churches of that state church itself, on American lecture platforms, and above all in more than fifty books.

(●) 1824 AD: Born on a farm at Huntly in Aberdeenshire, into a Highland family that had kept its Congregational faith and its Jacobite memories. + George MacDonald was born on 10 December 1824 at Huntly, in western Aberdeenshire, the second son in a farming family of several boys. The MacDonalds carried their history the way Highland families did, which is to say they kept the defeats and told them to the children. They reckoned themselves descended from one of the MacDonalds who got out alive from the massacre of Glencoe in February 1692, when government soldiers who had been quartered on the glen as guests rose in the small hours and killed their hosts. They told of a great-grandfather born on the very day of Culloden in April 1746, and of a red-haired piper in the line before him who lost his sight in that battle. Culloden was the moor near Inverness where the last Jacobite rising was destroyed, and Jacobite is a word worth pausing on, because it carries the whole political memory of a family like this one: a Jacobite held that the exiled Stuart line, and not the Hanoverian kings in London, were the rightful kings of Scotland and England, and after that April morning holding it could cost a man his land, his tartan and his life. His grandfather still spoke Gaelic and farmed and did some banking at Huntly. His people were Congregationalists, which mattered enormously. A Congregational church governs itself: no bishop, no presbytery, a gathered company of believers who call their own minister and can also, as George would learn, un-call him. The Calvinism he grew up inside was the strict Scottish kind, with the decree of election standing over everything. That phrase names the teaching that before the world was made God settled which people he would save, so that a man could pray, work, grieve over his sins and still be left in fear that he was not one of them. It is the doctrine the boy would later write whole sermons against, and he learned it first from the inside, on his knees, among people he loved. Then in 1832, when he was seven, his mother died. Helen MacKay MacDonald, daughter of a captain in the navy and sister of the Gaelic scholar Mackintosh MacKay, was carried off by the tuberculosis that would stalk her son’s whole family, taking three of his brothers and sisters, four of his own children, and a granddaughter before it was done with them. His father remarried in 1839, and Margaret MacColl was so good to the boys that George said late in life that when he saw both his mothers in heaven he did not know which he would kiss first. But the loss went deep and never closed. The tenderness toward grief in his books, and the mothers and grandmothers who keep turning up in them as figures of God, come from a house with a woman missing in it.

(●) 1840 AD: Four hungry years at King’s College, Aberdeen, broken by one year nobody has ever been able to account for. + In the autumn of 1840 he won a bursary at King’s College, Aberdeen. A bursary was the Scottish universities’ way of finding poor boys with brains: an open examination, sat by anyone who turned up, with the awards handed out in order of the marks. He placed twelfth and took a Fullerton award worth fourteen pounds, and went up to study the sciences. He took a third prize in chemistry and came fourth in natural philosophy, which is what the nineteenth century called physics. Fourteen pounds did not keep a student through a session, so he tutored to make up the difference, and his health suffered for it, as it would keep doing. His fellow students thought him a bit of a visionary, a young man who saw meanings in things the rest of them walked past. The odd thing about his college record is the gap. He attended from 1840 to 1845 but sat out the session of 1842 to 1843, and what he did with that missing year is one of the small unsolved puzzles of Victorian literary history. His son Greville, who had the family papers, could say only that his father spent some summer months in a castle or great house in the far north of Scotland, cataloguing a neglected library, and that he had failed to trace where it was. Readers have been guessing ever since, because MacDonald’s books are full of libraries in old houses that turn out to be doors into somewhere else. What is not a guess is what he found to read. Somewhere in these years he came upon the German Romantics, and one of them took hold of him for life: Novalis, the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a young German poet and mining engineer who died at twenty-eight in 1801 and who wrote that the world must be made to feel like a dream and the dream like the world. MacDonald’s very first publication, privately printed in 1851, was a translation of twelve of Novalis’ spiritual songs. He graduated Master of Arts in March 1845 and went south to London to look for tutoring work, and in September 1848 he entered Highbury College to train for the Congregational ministry.

(●) 1850 AD: He was given a small chapel at Arundel, and in under three years the deacons cut his salary until he resigned. + Highbury did not suit him and he did not finish the course, but in 1850 he was ordained to Trinity Congregational Chapel at Arundel in Sussex, a country town under a castle. In 1851 he married Louisa Powell, a London merchant’s daughter he had been writing to for years, and their first child, Lilia Scott, was born the following year. He was twenty-six, a minister at last, on a stipend of a hundred and fifty pounds a year, which was a thin living for a man with a household to keep, and preaching to perhaps a hundred people. It went wrong quickly. The complaint was that there was not enough doctrine in his sermons, and behind the complaint were two specific alarms. He was thought to be tainted with German theology, which in an English Congregational chapel of 1852 meant the whole suspect world of Coleridge, Schleiermacher and the Romantics: writers who talked about religion as something first felt and imagined rather than first defined, and who were therefore assumed to be on their way out of the faith by the shortest road. Worse, he had allowed in the pulpit that the heathen who never heard the gospel might yet have some dealing with God after death, which sounded to his deacons like the front door of the faith being left unlocked. Later tellings of the quarrel add a third grievance, that he had said animals might share in the life to come. The deacons were not clergy. They were the lay officers a Congregational chapel elects out of its own membership to keep the books, look after the building and pay the minister, and the paying is what they used. They did not hold a trial. They did something quieter and more effective: they moved to cut his already small salary, which for a man with a wife and a baby was a resignation letter written by other hands. He held on for something over a year, and sent in his resignation in May 1853. He was never again a minister of any church. Three years later the working men of Manchester, who paid rent on a room so that he could preach to them, took up a collection to send him to Algiers when his lungs gave out, which is as exact a measure as you could want of the difference between a congregation and a committee.

(●) 1855 AD: Out of a pulpit, coughing blood and nearly penniless, he published his first book and discovered what he was for. + The family went to Manchester, where he lectured, tutored in chemistry, and preached to whoever would have him. He was often ill and always short of money, and the pattern of the next twenty-five years was set here: write, lecture, borrow, move somewhere warmer, write again. In 1855 he published Within and Without, a dramatic poem about a marriage and a misunderstanding, first drafted at Arundel in the winter of 1850. It found few buyers and two remarkable readers. Tennyson liked it. Lady Byron, the poet’s widow, admired it so intensely that she sought MacDonald out, became his friend, quietly helped him with money, and left him a legacy when she died. When his lungs gave out in 1856 it was his Manchester hearers who subscribed the cost of a winter in Algiers, and Lady Byron who pressed him to go. Back in England he settled at Hastings on the south coast for three years, and there, in 1858, he wrote the strangest and most important book of his early life. Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women is the story of a young man named Anodos who wakes to find his bedroom turning into a forest and spends twenty-one days wandering a country where statues come alive, where his own shadow follows him and spoils everything it touches, and where he finally learns to die to himself. Nobody had written quite that book before. It is not an allegory with a key, and MacDonald spent the rest of his life insisting that it was not. An allegory with a key is a story in which each thing stands for one other thing, the way the Slough of Despond in Pilgrim’s Progress stands for despair, so that a reader who works out the code has got the message and can put the story down. Phantastes will not be read that way, because there is no code. It works the way weather works, changing the person who walks out in it without ever telling him anything. Reviewers were baffled and it sold badly. His father, who had backed him through every setback, died the same year. And a road had opened all the same: a man barred from a pulpit had found a way to preach that no board of deacons could touch.

(●) 1863 AD: David Elginbrod made him a popular novelist, and the London house he filled with children became a kind of open workshop. + He had settled in London by 1860, took the chair of English literature at Bedford College, the London college founded to give women a university education, and in 1863 published David Elginbrod, a novel about a Scottish farm labourer of enormous quiet holiness. It sold. From then until the 1890s he produced a novel almost every year, most of them long, many of them set in the Aberdeenshire he had left, and they made him one of the well-known writers of Victorian Britain. Readers who never opened a sermon met his theology inside a story about a fishing village. The MacDonald household was crowded and busy and oddly public, in a string of London houses and then, from 1867, in a Georgian house by the river at Hammersmith called the Retreat. There were eleven children, and the people who came to see the father seem to have ended up staying for the household. John Ruskin, the most famous art critic in England and a badly unhappy man, came and worked his troubles out there. Lewis Carroll came, and in 1863 left the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground for Louisa to read aloud to the children, which is as good a piece of market research as the century produced: their small son Greville said he wished there were sixty thousand volumes of it, and Carroll, encouraged, published. Louisa staged Pilgrim’s Progress with the children in the parts. And Frederick Denison Maurice became MacDonald’s friend, an Anglican theologian who had himself been thrown out of a professorship for questioning whether eternal punishment meant endless torment, which tells you both what MacDonald was drawn to and what it cost a man in that century to ask the question out loud. In 1866 MacDonald joined the Church of England as a layman. It was not a repudiation of the chapels that had raised him, and he went on preaching in Nonconformist pulpits whenever he was asked. He wrote from its first numbers for a magazine called Good Words for the Young and edited it from 1869, and it is there that the books people still read began to appear, serialized for children a chapter at a time: At the Back of the North Wind, in which a cabman’s boy named Diamond is carried off by a woman with black streaming hair who is the north wind and also, the book hints without ever quite saying, death; and then The Princess and the Goblin, with its staircase that only Irene can find and the great-great-grandmother spinning at the top of it.

(●) 1872 AD: He crossed the Atlantic to lecture, and America received him like a prophet. + In the autumn of 1872 MacDonald sailed for the United States with Louisa and his son Greville for a lecture tour that ran into the following spring. He spoke chiefly on Robert Burns, the ploughman poet every emigrant Scot could still quote, and on Shakespeare. He spoke without notes, and the halls filled. A Scotsman in a cloak with a long beard and a voice trained in chapels, talking about poetry as though a man’s soul depended on it, was exactly what America seven years out of its civil war wanted to hear. He met Emerson, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Whittier, which is a fair share of the American literary establishment in a single season. He also met Mark Twain, who became a friend and stayed one, and a Scottish preacher of the fatherhood of God keeping the affection of the most irreverent man in American letters is an unlikely pairing that says something about both men. A large New York congregation offered him its pulpit at a salary that would have ended his money troubles for good, and he turned it down. Twenty years after Arundel, he had decided what he was, and it was not a settled minister. The tour made his name and it did not make him rich. He came home to the same treadmill of novels and lectures, and to a household where the cough that had killed his mother was beginning to move among his children.

(●) 1877 AD: A pension from Queen Victoria let him move to the Italian Riviera, where he buried four of his children and wrote his last and darkest book before coming home to England to die in 1905 AD. + In 1877 the Crown granted MacDonald a civil list pension of a hundred pounds a year. A civil list pension was money Parliament set aside for people who had served the country in letters or science and had nothing to live on, and it came for life. A hundred pounds was not a fortune, and it did not stop him working, but with the Italian sun thrown in it was survival. The family began wintering on the Riviera, and from 1881 to 1902 they lived most of each year at Bordighera, in a house they built largely out of gifts from friends and named Casa Coraggio, the house of courage. It became a kind of unofficial parish: he preached there, lectured there, ran a lending library, and the poor of the town knew the door. The name was earned, and the price of it can be read off four dates. In 1878 his daughter Mary Josephine died. The following March his fifteen-year-old son Maurice developed a cough and a fever and was dead within a fortnight. Grace, another daughter, died in 1884. Lilia, the eldest, the baby born at Arundel, died in 1891, having nursed a friend through the same disease and caught it. Four children of eleven, and the same disease each time. Anyone who wants to know whether MacDonald’s writing about the goodness of God was bought cheaply can put the dates of the books next to the dates of the funerals. His last romance, Lilith, came in 1895, and it is nothing like the children’s stories. Romance, in the sense he and the medieval writers he loved gave the word, means a tale of marvels and long journeys rather than a love story, and this one is a hard, haunted book about a man who cannot be saved until he consents to lie down and sleep in a house of the dead, and about a woman who will not open her hand. After it came one last novel and a few short late pieces, and then he fell largely silent, which in a man who had put out a book almost every year for thirty years is a loud silence. Louisa died in 1902, soon after their golden wedding, the fiftieth anniversary of the marriage of 1851, and was buried at Bordighera. He came back to England, spoke very little in his last years, and died on 18 September 1905 at Ashtead in Surrey, in the house of his youngest daughter. He was cremated at Woking and his ashes were laid in Louisa’s grave in the English cemetery at Bordighera, under the hills where he had done his last good work.

What He Taught

(T1) God is Father first, and every other thing said about him has to be said in a way that leaves the word Father meaning what it says. + Think of a child who has been told, repeatedly and kindly, that the man in the next room is his father, and who has also been told that the man may or may not have decided to keep him. The child will be polite. The child will not run into the room. Something in the second sentence has quietly cancelled the first, and no amount of insisting on the word father will undo it. That is MacDonald’s complaint against the theology he grew up in, and he aims it at a particular doctrine: adoption, in the sense some of his teachers gave the word. Adoption is a real New Testament term. Paul says believers have received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15), and he means something glorious about being brought into a family with legal standing and an inheritance. MacDonald heard it preached as something else: that a human being is by origin no child of God at all, a stranger with no claim, who may perhaps be taken in. Preach it that way, he said, and the heart sinks in a cold faint at the gate of heaven, because the child is being asked to love a benefactor rather than a father. His counter-claim is not that everyone is saved, which is a different question (T3). It is that God made us and therefore fatherhood is the truth about the relation from the start, so that the gospel is a lost son coming home to his own father rather than an orphan hoping to be selected. He read the parable in Luke 15 as the plainest thing Jesus ever said about the character of God: the father is already running while the son is still rehearsing his speech (Luke 15:20). Everything else in MacDonald follows from this. Holiness is what a good father is; wrath is what a good father feels about what is destroying his child; hell is what a good father will not leave a child in.

(Q) "The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry Father! from a full heart." + Source: George MacDonald, "Abba, Father!", Unspoken Sermons, Second Series (1885). The opening line of the sermon, preaching on Romans 8:15. Hardest, because the word costs everything to mean; gladdest, because there is nothing else worth saying. MacDonald spends the rest of the sermon on the teaching that makes the cry difficult, and he is arguing with his own childhood as much as with anyone else’s.

(T2) You find out whether Christ is telling the truth by doing what he says, not by examining how you feel about it. + A man learning to swim can read about buoyancy for a year and still not know, in the way that matters, that water holds a body up. He knows it about four seconds after he stops clutching the rail. MacDonald thought a great deal of Victorian religion was clutching the rail: people examining their assurance, testing their conversion, taking the temperature of their own faith, and getting nowhere, because the thing they wanted to know is not knowable from the bank. His prescription is ruthlessly simple and, once heard, hard to unhear. Stop asking whether you believe. Ask instead whether there is one thing you did today, or one thing you refrained from doing, because Jesus said so. If you cannot think of anything he ever said that made the slightest difference to what you did or did not do, then you have good reason to doubt you are his disciple, and the remedy is not more introspection but obedience in the nearest available matter. He is not making salvation a wage paid for good behaviour. He is saying that obedience is the organ of spiritual knowledge, the way the eye is the organ of sight, and that a person who will not use the organ cannot complain that the room is dark. The point is not his invention. Jesus states it: "If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority" (John 7:17). What MacDonald adds is the pastoral edge. He had watched people torture themselves about the state of their souls, and he judged that the torture was itself a form of self-absorption, another way of remaining the centre of one’s own attention (T4).

(Q) "Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it." + Source: George MacDonald, "The Truth in Jesus", Unspoken Sermons, Second Series (1885). MacDonald has imagined a reader breaking in to say, "But I do not know how to awake and arise!" This is his answer, and it is the sentence of his that has travelled furthest among ordinary Christian readers. It is given as the first step for someone who is stuck, not as a definition of the gospel.

(T3) The fire that Scripture says God is turns out to be his love, and it burns to destroy the sin rather than the sinner. + Anyone who has watched a mother deal with a child’s infected splinter has seen the shape of this argument. The child screams and means it. The mother is not angry, is not enjoying herself, and will not stop, and the reason she will not stop is not that she loves the child less than the child would like but that she loves him more. A love that could be talked out of the tweezers would be a smaller love, not a kinder one. MacDonald takes the line in Hebrews, "for our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29), which had normally been preached as a warning about wrath, and argues that the fire and the love are the same thing seen from two positions. Love wants its object perfect, so everything in the beloved that is not lovely has to go, and it will go by burning if it will go no other way. This is why, on his reading, the fire is worse news for the sinner than a merely angry God would be: an angry God might be appeased, and the whole point of the sermon is that this one cannot. Prayer will not talk him down. Time will not wear him out. He is often read carelessly, so two things need keeping straight. He is not saying that punishment is unreal or that it is gentle. He uses the New Testament’s own hardest images: the outer darkness, where a man stands shut out of the lighted house, and the last farthing, which is Jesus’ picture of a debtor who does not get out of the prison until the final coin of what he owes has been handed over. He says plainly that a terrible doom awaits the man who resists. What he is saying is that punishment is always aimed at the destruction of the sin and the recovery of the person, never at the satisfaction of a claim. That second clause is the controversial one, and it does not survive contact with every text in the New Testament.

(Q) "Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor." + Source: George MacDonald, "The Consuming Fire", Unspoken Sermons, First Series (1867). The first two sentences of the sermon, on Hebrews 12:29. Inexorable means what cannot be begged off or turned aside by entreaty, and MacDonald is deliberately hanging the hardest word in the sentence on the gentlest thing in the universe. A love that could be persuaded to leave you as you are, he says in the lines that follow, would not be love yielding but love failing.

(T4) Hell has exactly one principle, and it is the sentence "I am my own." + In the sermon called "Kingship" MacDonald sets out to say what Jesus meant by telling Pilate that he was born to bear witness to the truth, and he gets there by describing the exact opposite of Christ: a self that has curled around itself. He writes it as a speech, and the speech is chilling because it is so reasonable. I am my own. My thoughts start from me and come back to me. My pleasure is my pleasure. My judgment is the rule of things. My right is what I want. The less I owe anyone, the freer I am. Nothing in that speech is a crime. That is the point. There is no murder in it, no theft, nothing a magistrate could act on, and it is nonetheless, on MacDonald’s account, the whole substance of damnation, needing only time and consistency to become what Scripture calls the outer darkness. He is doing with the doctrine of sin what he did with the doctrine of hell: moving it out of the courtroom and into the person, so that the punishment is not a sentence imposed from outside but the thing itself allowed to have its way. Christians who part company with MacDonald elsewhere have usually kept this. Lewis built The Great Divorce on it, and its famous line about the two kinds of people, those who say to God thy will be done and those to whom God says at last thy will be done, is MacDonald’s point with the dust blown off. The self that insists on being its own gets what it insists on, and getting it is the ruin.

(Q) "I am my own. I am my own king and my own subject." + Source: George MacDonald, "Kingship", Unspoken Sermons, Third Series (1889). MacDonald names this as the one principle of hell, and then lets the voice run on for most of a page: my glory, my ambition, my kingdom, my right is what I desire. He is not describing a monster. He is describing a respectable person with the lid off.

(T5) The imagination is not decoration but a faculty made in the image of God’s own, and a fairy tale works on a reader the way a storm does. + Ask someone what a piece of music means and watch the question fail. You can say what it did to you, and you can say it badly, and the saying is never the thing. MacDonald thought stories of a certain kind were like that on purpose, and he built a whole theory of writing on it. Start with the word. Imagination, for him, is a faculty, meaning a standing power of the mind in the way that memory and reason are powers of the mind rather than pastimes, and the power in question is the making of images. He insists on taking the root of the word seriously: God imagines, in the sense of calling into being what was not there, and man imagines in a smaller, derived way, making new forms out of what God has already made. He is careful about the difference. Creation, the calling of something out of nothing, is God’s alone; the human writer works with material handed to him, as a child builds with bricks he did not mill. But the faculty itself is a likeness, not a hobby, and it is one of the places where the image of God in a human being shows. That conviction is what makes his fairy tales behave as they do. He refused to supply keys. A fairy tale, he said, is not an allegory with a meaning locked in it that the clever reader extracts and the rest miss; it is more like weather, or a sonata, or a night sky, working on the part of a person that lies underneath the understanding, and rousing different things in different people, which is not a defect but the design. Nature does not deliver one definite message to every observer either, and nobody calls nature a failure for it. So the best thing a writer can do for a reader, short of waking his conscience, is not to hand him thoughts but to wake up what is already in him.

(Q) "The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man must have been of God first." + Source: George MacDonald, "The Imagination: Its Functions and its Culture", in A Dish of Orts (1893); the essay first appeared in the British Quarterly Review in 1867. He has just spent two pages refusing to call human making "creation," precisely so that he can then claim the higher thing: that the faculty itself is modelled on God’s. The essay goes on to a remark that catches his whole mind at once, that if God would give us a drama he makes a Shakespeare, and if he would have a drama more immediately his own he builds the stage and makes the actors, who do not act their parts but are them.

(Q) "If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again." + Source: George MacDonald, "The Fantastic Imagination", in A Dish of Orts (1893). Written late, as a preface for a collection of his fairy tales, and as close as he ever came to stating his own aim. He is answering readers who wanted to be told what his stories meant. A firefly cannot be kept; it can only be watched for. Twenty-three years after he wrote the sentence, a schoolboy on a railway platform in Surrey would provide the best evidence that the method worked.

What Christian Readers Made of Him

(†) C. S. Lewis called him his master, and put him into a book as the one man who could explain heaven and hell. + The debt is documented better than most literary debts, because Lewis kept saying it out loud. He bought Phantastes at the Leatherhead bookstall on 4 March 1916 and wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves about it three days later. In Surprised by Joy, the book in which he told the story of his own long road into belief, written forty years on, he described what that night had done to him: his imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized. He was an atheist at the time and remained one for years, which is exactly why the phrase is worth attention. Something was converted well before he was. In 1945 Lewis wrote The Great Divorce, a fantasy in which the ghosts of the damned take a bus to the outskirts of heaven, and when he needed a guide for the narrator he used MacDonald himself, by name, walking out of the trees to explain what the reader is seeing. The year after, he published George MacDonald: An Anthology, three hundred and sixty-five extracts, most of them from the Unspoken Sermons, and said in the preface that he had never concealed the fact that he regarded MacDonald as his master and fancied he had never written a book in which he did not quote him. Lewis was not uncritical, and the shape of his praise matters. He thought MacDonald an indifferent novelist much of the time, a writer whose sentences often lumbered, and he said so. What he claimed for him was something else: a gift for myth of the first order, and, in the sermons, a quality of holiness that came through the prose. It is a useful correction for readers who arrive expecting the sentences of Lewis and find Victorian three-deckers instead, the three-volume novels the lending libraries demanded and their subscribers worked through a volume at a time.

(†) His fairy tales set the pattern that Christian imaginative writing has followed ever since. + G. K. Chesterton wrote the introduction to Greville MacDonald’s life of his father in 1924, and used it to make an admission he clearly enjoyed making: that of all the books he had ever read, the one that had made a difference to his whole existence, and taught him to see things a certain way from the start, was The Princess and the Goblin. What he took from it was the conviction that the fairy tale is the inside of the ordinary story rather than an escape from it, and that the staircase in your own house may be the important thing about it. The line of descent is long and unusually traceable. Lewis Carroll tried out Alice on the MacDonald children before he dared publish. J. R. R. Tolkien said that the goblins of The Hobbit owed a good deal to the goblin tradition as it appears in MacDonald, all but the soft feet, which he never believed in, and in his essay on fairy stories he praised "The Golden Key" as one of the places where MacDonald succeeded, a story of power and beauty. The admiration did not last the whole way, though: he grew impatient with MacDonald in later life and said so. W. H. Auden the poet, Madeleine L’Engle the novelist, and a good many others have said much the same in their own terms. What they were taking was not a set of doctrines but a permission: that the unseen world can be written about as solid, that a children’s story can carry weight, and that a reader’s imagination is a thing worth converting. None of that was easily won. The evangelical world MacDonald came out of was often suspicious of fiction as such, on the ground that a made-up story is a lie told at length. He spent his life arguing the other way, and he did it mostly by writing books good enough to settle the question.

(†) The sermons he could not preach from a pulpit outlived the novels that paid his bills. + MacDonald published the three series of Unspoken Sermons in 1867, 1885 and 1889, and the title is exact: these are sermons he was never asked to give. The Arundel deacons had seen to that in 1853. He wrote them down instead, with no congregation in front of him and nobody to please, and the result is the least Victorian thing he produced, short paragraphs of plain, hard argument with almost no ornament. They were not widely read in his lifetime. The novels were. A century later the position has reversed: the novels are mostly for specialists and the sermons keep being reprinted, quoted in pulpits that would have refused him a pulpit, and handed to people in trouble. The Wade Center at Wheaton College, the research library built around seven British writers, collects him alongside Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, Sayers, Williams and Barfield, which is roughly the company he keeps now. Christians who disagree sharply with him on the last things still use him on the first ones. His account of obedience as the road to knowledge (T2), his refusal to let self-examination substitute for following Christ, and his description of sin as the self curled around itself (T4) have travelled across every party line in the church. That is a fair measure of the man: the parts of him that are simply the New Testament said freshly have outlasted the parts where he went further than the New Testament goes.

(†) Where he went past his evidence: a justice with nothing owed in it, and a hope he stated as a certainty. + MacDonald is one of the rare cases where the criticism can be made in the subject’s own words, because he saw the edge of what he was doing and walked over it deliberately. Two places are worth marking, and a third that is not a fault at all. - Justice with nothing owed in it. In the sermon "Justice" he argues that punishment cannot exist for its own sake, as a make-up for sin, or as any satisfaction to justice, but only for the sake of amendment. That is half of something true. Scripture does present God’s discipline as remedial, aimed at our good. But it also speaks of a debt that is actually paid, and of God as both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:25-26), and of a servant pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities (Isaiah 53:5). Christians differ, and have always differed, about the mechanics of the atonement, which is the question of how exactly the death of Christ deals with human sin, and MacDonald is not outside the faith for disliking a crude account of it. What he does is stronger than dislike. Satisfaction is the word for the older answer he is refusing: the idea that sin puts a real debt on the books, that God’s justice has an actual claim, and that the cross is where the claim is met rather than waived. MacDonald denies that there is any claim there to meet, and in doing so he has to set aside the plain sense of texts he does not answer. - A hope stated as a certainty. He believed that God will not stop until every soul is burnt clean and brought home, which is the position usually called universalism, the belief that in the end nobody is finally lost, and he said so in print: our poor brothers and sisters, every one. The hope has real footing in Scripture, which says God desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) and is not wishing that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9). The difficulty is that Jesus also said, in the same breath as the promise of eternal life, "And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (Matthew 25:46), and MacDonald’s reading has to make that sentence mean less than it appears to. The honest thing is that he knew it. At the end of "The Consuming Fire" he tells God that he will trust him "even for that which thou hast not spoken," which is a man admitting, in prayer, that he is hoping beyond his warrant. A reader can respect that sentence and still decline to build on it. - Not a fault: the warmth itself. He was accused in his own day of making God too kind, and the charge was wrong. The God of the Unspoken Sermons is more frightening than the God of his critics, not less, because he cannot be appeased and will not leave anything alone (T3). MacDonald’s error, where it is an error, is not softness. It is a refusal to let a hard text stand unrelieved. He spent fifty years telling people who had been taught that God is a judge that God is a father, and he did it better than almost anyone. The place to read him is the sermons, with the Bible open beside them, which is exactly how he would have wanted it.