George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet and Christian minister. He was a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow writer Lewis Carroll. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology, including several collections of sermons.
His writings have been cited as a major literary influence by many notable authors including Lewis Carroll, W. H. Auden, David Lindsay, J. M. Barrie, Lord Dunsany, Elizabeth Yates, Oswald Chambers, Mark Twain, Hope Mirrlees, Robert E. Howard, L. Frank Baum, T.H. White, Richard Adams, Lloyd Alexander, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien,[2] Walter de la Mare,[3] E. Nesbit, Peter S. Beagle, Neil Gaiman and Madeleine L’Engle.
According to biographer William Raeper, MacDonald’s theology
“celebrated the rediscovery of God as Father, and sought to encourage an intuitive response to God and Christ through quickening his readers’ spirits in their reading of the Bible and their perception of nature.”
MacDonald’s oft-mentioned universalism is not the idea that everyone will automatically be saved, but is closer to Gregory of Nyssa in the view that all will ultimately repent and be restored to God. (via Wikipedia)
On Love:
To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.
On Life:
Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life.
On Death:
How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.
Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life.
On God:
Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action.
Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace.
There is more hid in Christ than we shall ever learn, here or there either but they that begin first to inquire will soonest be gladdened with revelation and with them He will be best pleased, for the slowness of His disciples troubled Him of old. To say that we must wait for the other world, to know the mind of Him who came t o this world to give Himself to us, seems to me the foolishness of a worldly and lazy spirit. The Son of God is the teacher of men, giving to them of His Spirit that Spirit which manifests the deep things of God, being to a man the mind of Christ. The great heresy of the Church of the present day is unbelief in this Spirit.
Most of the Psalms were born in a wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through the fire. The greatest poets have learned in suffering what they taught in song. In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim’s Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He puts them in the fire.
I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.
Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.