George MacDonald

The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald, illustrated by Maria L. Kirk, Philadelphia - J. B. Lippincott Co., 1908.

(via dreaminparis)

2 weeks ago -

11

The book was an unhealthy one, a cup filled to the brim with a poverty-stricken and selfish religion: such are always breaking out like an eruption here and there over the body of the Church, doing their part, doubtless, in carrying off the evil humours generated by poverty of blood, or the congestion of self-preservation. It is wonderful out of what spoiled fruit some children will suck sweetness.

George MacDonald, “The Gifts of the Child Christ,” chapter 1

Interesting collection of metaphors.

(via triadic)

1 month ago -

2

Brief Hiatus

My selections will, hopefully, resume in a few months…

1 month ago -

1

On either hand we behold a birth, of which, as of the moon, we see but half. We are outside the one, waiting for a life from the unknown; we are inside the other, watching the departure of a spirit from the womb of the world into the unknown. To the region whither he goes, the man enters newly born. We forget that it is a birth, and call it a death. The body he leaves behind is but the placenta by which he drew his nourishment from his mother Earth. And as the child-bed is watched on earth with anxious expectancy, so the couch of the dying, as we call them, may be surrounded by the birth-watchers of the other world, waiting like anxious servants to open the door to which this world is but the wind-blown porch.

Extremes meet. As a man draws nigh to his second birth, his heart looks back to his childhood. When Dr. Anderson knew that he was dying, he retired into the simulacrum of his father’s benn end.

George MacDonald, Robert Falconer, Book 3, p. 61

2 months ago

Do you think God cares to have me do his will? Is it anything to him?”
“I am sure of it. Why did he make you else? But it is not for the sake of being obeyed that he cares for it, but for the sake of serving you, and making you blessed with his blessedness. He does not think about himself, but about you.

George MacDonald, David Elginbrod, p.408 (Johannesen edition)

2 months ago -

3

Let your tears flow; let your sad sighs have scope;
Only take heed they fan, they water Hope.

George MacDonald

(Source: gmd)

2 months ago -

4

Those who believe they have found a higher truth, with its higher mode of conveyance, are very apt to err in undervaluing, even to the degree of wishing to remove the lower forms in which truth, if not embodied exactly, is at least wrapt up. Truth may be presented in the grandeur of a marble statue, or in a brown-paper parcel. I choose the sculpture; my last son prefers the parcel. The only question is whether there is truth—not in the abstract, but as assimilable by the recipient—present in the form. I cannot, however, resume without aword on the other side. To the man who sees and feels the higher and nobler form, it is given to teach that. Let those to whom the lower represents the sum of things, teach it with their whole hearts. He has nothing to do with it, for he cannot teach it without being false. The snare of the devil holds men who, capable of teaching the higher, talk of the people not being ready to receive it, and therefore teach them in formswhich are to their own souls an obstruction. There is cowardice and desertion in it. They leave their own harder and higher work to do the easier and clumsier work of their neighbor. It is wasteful of time, truth, and energy. The man who is most careful over the truth that lies in forms not his own, will be the man most careful to let no time-serving drag him down—not to the level of the lower teachers, for they are honest—but to the level of Job’s friends, who lied for God; nay, lower still; for this will soon cease to be lying even for God, and become lying for himself.

George MacDonald, Guild Court, p. 239-40 (Johannesen Edition)

2 months ago -

1

To My Father

George MacDonald
Algiers, April, 1857.

I.
Take of the first fruits, Father, of thy care,
Wrapped in the fresh leaves of my gratitude
Late waked for early gifts ill understood;
Claiming in all my harvests rightful share,
Whether with song that mounts the joyful air
I praise my God; or, in yet deeper mood,
Sit dumb because I know a speechless good,
Needing no voice, but all the soul for prayer.

Thou hast been faithful to my highest need;
And I, thy debtor, ever, evermore,
Shall never feel the grateful burden sore.
Yet most I thank thee, not for any deed,
But for the sense thy living self did breed
That fatherhood is at the great world’s core.

II.
All childhood, reverence clothed thee, undefined,
As for some being of another race;
Ah! not with it departing—grown apace
As years have brought me manhood’s loftier mind
Able to see thy human life behind—
The same hid heart, the same revealing face—
My own dim contest settling into grace
Of sorrow, strife, and victory combined.

So I beheld my God, in childhood’s morn,
A mist, a darkness, great, and far apart,
Moveless and dim—I scarce could say Thou art:
My manhood came, of joy and sadness born—
Full soon the misty dark, asunder torn,
Revealed man’s glory, God’s great human heart.

2 months ago