The Scottish author George MacDonald (1824-1905) has sometimes been referred to as a Universalist. Because so many people have diverse ideas about what this term means, it is easy to become confused regarding what the usage of that word implies about MacDonald’s religious views. As editor of Wingfold, a magazine devoted to George MacDonald that I first established in 1993, I have sometimes come across information which illuminates the beliefs of a man who can easily seem, even to his most devoted admirers, to be at odds with Christianity. In an effort to clarify MacDonald’s status and reputation upon this subject, I am pleased to share some of that relevant information in this donated article.

Much of the quoted material here has been featured in past issues of Wingfold. Because so many of these articles came from obscure sources, they are identified by the particular issues in which they were reprinted. I hope this format will provide easier access for those who may wish to read the material in full.

In the biography George MacDonald and His Wife, Greville MacDonald wrote about his father’s concerns regarding “the increasingly easy tendencies in universalists, who, because they had now discarded everlasting retribution as a popular superstition, were dismissing hell-fire altogether, and with it the need for repentance as the way back into the Kingdom.” (pp. 551-2) I have repeatedly seen George MacDonald denounced in print for being a Universalist by people who may well have defined that term in the same way MacDonald himself did. Others regard calling MacDonald a Universalist as the ultimate compliment, intending to represent him as someone who believed that all would find God, in this world or the next. But because the term Universalist is so open to diverse interpretations, and because MacDonald appears to have rejected the label for himself, I have never referred to George MacDonald as a Universalist. Yet the nature of MacDonald’s beliefs, as specified by himself in considerable detail, makes a bond to the concept of universal salvation unavoidable.    

George MacDonald repeatedly rejected offers to write his memoirs, or to be interviewed. It is thus surprising to learn from 19th century newspaper reports that, as an extempore lecturer and lay preacher, he sometimes shared intimate details from his personal history with the public. Among the most intriguing of these is in a report of MacDonald’s 1888 sermon to a London congregation, relating his thoughts on the Calvinism that dominated his childhood in Huntly, Scotland:

   Few of you have any idea of the horrible religious education of which I for one was a victim. In that education God was not light, bands of fearful falsehood were drawn across the glory of His radiance. It was a lie against God. (Wingfold Summer 2014.)

The question naturally arises as to how George MacDonald so completely broke free in later years from those bands he regarded as so fearful and false. The answer may lie in part with a basic examination of the genuine facts which should surely comprise any proper education on the foundations of Christianity.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia relates that a dogmatic pronouncement in the year 543 declared the punishment of the damned to be eternal. Prior stages of punishment for the wicked in the history of the Church had included being banned from taking communion, then banned from worship, gradually descending to being banned from the Roman Empire. But the New Catholic Encyclopedia proclaimed that these past temporary conditions for the unrepentant were rendered untenable by the dogma of 543, adding that since that date, eternal damnation for the wicked had remained the official position for the Catholic Church. The concept of a purging of sins in the afterlife, which may have had roots in Rabbinical Judaism, was later established by the Catholic Church “for all who have died in God’s grace and friendship but still imperfectly purified.” The information above may be found in any reputable resource volume on the history of Christianity. Of particular interest is Bamber Gascoigne’s The Christians, in which the decision of 543 is not referenced until Chapter 4, which covers the Middle Ages. Gascoigne enhanced this information with photographs of paintings, statues and church windows from that era, which frequently depicted demons and the sufferings of the damned in hell. “Most of the people coming to church in the Middle Ages couldn’t read,” Gascoigne wrote: “sculpture and paintings were described as ‘books for the illiterate.’” (p. 90) Gascoigne implied that it had taken centuries of ignorance and deprivation, the literal Dark Ages, for belief in eternal damnation to become pervasively accepted by Christians. Among the other beliefs Gascoigne listed as common in the Middle Ages was that Satan’s minions were fond of lettuce, so there was a risk of swallowing a demon in a salad.

It is natural for Christians to assume that by reading their Bibles, they are familiarizing themselves with the foundations of their faith. But thanks to the ongoing domination of the 543 dogma and its impact upon translations of scripture, to quote Ira Gershwin, “It ain’t necessarily so.” Many Protestant Christians have never read a book on the history of their religion, and so do not know that the words translated as “hell” in the New Testament were never originally intended to represent a place of eternal punishment. Many members of clergy, who are required to get extensive educations before they commence preaching in pulpits, seem inexplicably unaware that an eternal hell was not invented until the mid-sixth century, and was not commonly accepted as such by Christians for years afterwards.

It is in consequence of so many centuries of such unnecessary ignorance that George MacDonald has repeatedly been stigmatized, in his own time and to this day, as having basically invented his own personal version of Christianity, in opposition to scripture and to conventional church teaching. MacDonald’s contemporary Rev. George McCrie, lecturing in 1869 on “Heresy in Our Novels,” was quoted as follows concerning George MacDonald: “He maintains that (God’s) punishment is sanctifying, and he maintains that it is carried on in the next world only for a certain period. He held therefore to by purgatory, and was in this sense as bad as the papists, but he denied a hell, and was in this sense worse than a heathen.” (Wingfold Winter 2015.) In actuality, George MacDonald consistently demonstrated his awareness of Christian history, both in his written works and in his public extempore discourses, by rejecting the concept of an eternal hell, and by professing his belief in a type of purgatory.

MacDonald had laid down the gauntlet in this cause early in his literary career, with his first novel David Elginbrod, 1862. The young boy Harry, listening to a family Bible reading interpreted as the doctrine of election, in which a select few are chosen by God for salvation, cried out, “I don't want God to love me, if he does not love everybody,” (p. 327) and fled the room in tears. MacDonald offered the spiritual antidote to this predicament, as narrator of his own novel:

   ...surely the only refuge from heathenish representations of God under Christian forms, the only refuge from man’s blinding and paralyzing theories, from the dead wooden shapes substituted for the living forms of human love and hope and aspiration, from the interpretations which render scripture as dry as a speech in Chancery—surely the one refuge from all these awful evils is the Son of man; for no misrepresentation and no misconception can destroy the beauty of that face which the marring of sorrow has elevated into the region of reality, beyond the marring of irreverent speculation and scholastic definition. From the God of man’s painting, we turn to the man of God’s being, and he leads us to the true God, the radiation of whose glory we first see in him. (p. 328)

Perhaps the most detailed evidence of George MacDonald’s familiarity with early Christian history is found in the numerous press reports of his 1886-1891 lectures on Dante’s The Divine Comedy. He was repeatedly quoted saying that when Protestants decided three places in the afterlife were too many, “they got rid of the wrong one.” While MacDonald’s defense of a purgatory is not commonly recognized by those whose reading has been limited to his books, there were occasional contemporaries of his, aside from McCrie, who noticed his written inclinations in this direction. An unidentified 1867 columnist, having read the latest installment in Argosy of MacDonald’s novel Robert Falconer, in which a possible redemption for Robert’s father in the next world is implied, wrote, “Mr. Macdonald … in his own inimitable way, endeavours to show that the feeble, stupid, self-willed mortal who refuses to listen to the beseeching ‘still, small voice’ of Heavenly Love here, may and probably will be doomed to a terrible probation—but yet a probation—in some other sphere. Mr. Macdonald, a Protestant writer, utters no uncertain sound on this point.” (Wingfold Winter 2015.) But it was in MacDonald’s Dante lectures that he made most clear his belief in a purgatory. “I do indeed believe in a place of punishment,” he told an 1890 lecture audience, “but that longing and pain will bring us back to God … There is a deep truth in the soul undergoing Purgatory in order that it may return to God—in whom we live and move—at all times.” (Wingfold Winter 2015.) When speaking about Dante’s Inferno, MacDonald would reveal his opposition to the notion of an eternal hell to a degree that he rarely did in writing: “Dante’s mind got lowered by even imagining a hell like this, and this proves that it is no place ordained by God.” (Wingfold Winter 2015.) A report of MacDonald’s lecture titled “Dante’s Beliefs” reads in part: “… the one thing in life that puzzled him was the strange co-existence in the human mind of two beliefs, which would seem the one to destroy the other. He found it difficult to realize the possibility of a man with a glorious faith, holding side by side with it something blacker than any shadow that light could cast … the lower Dante got in his ‘Inferno’ the worse he became.” (Wingfold Winter 2009.) Even Dante’s Paradiso came in for criticism from MacDonald, much as he admired the poem, for he regarded Dante’s vision of heaven as impacted by his view of hell: “… they need not bind themselves to Dante’s idea of how heaven might be constituted and arrayed, not one atom more than they were bound to accept the very repellent notions that came to them when they were children from whatever source, with regard to the blessed heaven. He could well remember agonizing as a child to rejoice in the expectation of the heavenly bliss as it was presented to him. He found it simply impossible, and no wonder, for there was no real notion of bliss in it.” (Wingfold Winter 2005.)

 Among other evidence of MacDonald’s familiarity with the foundations of Christianity is his varied usage of the term “the ages.” MacDonald’s friend Rev. Andrew Jukes addressed the importance of this subject in his 1877 book The Second Death and the Restitution of All Things:

Every scholar knows that the expressions, “ages,” “to the ages,” “age of the ages,” and “ages of the ages” are unlike anything which occurs in the heathen Greek writers. The reason is, that the inspired writers, and they alone, understood the mystery and purpose of the “ages”…

Would it not have been better therefore, and more respectful to the Word of God, had our Translators been content in every place to give the exact meaning of the words, which they render ‘for ever,’ or ‘for ever and ever,’ but which are simply ‘for the age,’ or ‘for the ages of ages’ … These and other similar forms of expression cannot have been used without a purpose. It is, therefore, a matter of regret that our Translators should not have rendered them exactly and literally. (Longmans, Green & Co., pp. 61-63.)

 In George MacDonald’s first volume of Unspoken Sermons, 1867, we find his repeated references to the concept of the ages: “It may be centuries of ages before a man comes to see a truth.” (p. 28)  “For this vision of truth God has been working for ages of ages.” (p. 29) “… through ages of strife and ages of growth, yet let us at last see thy face.” (p. 117) A report of MacDonald’s 1873 sermon in his hometown of Huntly reads: “I believe this earth was set going, and through millions of years, through eons and cycles of time has been preparing for this—that men might there learn to know the Son of God, and so become sons of God,” (Wingfold Fall 2014.) Reports of MacDonald's sermons from later years sometimes indicated he was combining an acknowledgment of a purgatory with the concept of the ages. An 1887 report of MacDonald’s lecture on “Justice” quoted him saying, “My heart rests upon my Divine Master the Lord Jesus. I believe His Spirit will reach every heart; it may be thousands of years hence before it all happens, yet the words will come, ‘I am sorry; forgive me.’” (Wingfold Winter 2012.) A report of his sermon given in 1890 reads, “It may be that some of you have to go through aeons of sorrows, and pains, and miseries, because you will not know what the Lord means, but have to be driven like cattle, to know the will of God at last, it may be through torture.” (Wingfold Spring 2010.)

This aspect of MacDonald’s religious knowledge is often unknown to his readers, due largely to his never having knowingly fallen back upon emphasizing the role of historic precedent as a defense for his faith in a God whose mercy endures forever. He repeatedly chose instead to present a moral case for the God of Love. Among the most compelling examples of this defense is in the opening comments from a report of his 1885 sermon in Edinburgh:

I do not desire to prove any doctrine, if it were the truest under the sun, to your brain or intellect. That I should account to be but labor lost; for a man may believe all the doctrines of the Bible with his intellect, and be only nearer Satan for it. We can learn what is true only by knowing Him who is the Truth. If we know Christ the whole sphere of human knowledge opens to our view. Christ is the door into everything man can know aright. This is true even in matters of science. If a man knows Christ he stands on a rock of vantage from which the whole plain of truth can be descried. (Wingfold Summer 2007.)

 The importance of moral proof to MacDonald was sometimes demonstrated in his extempore literary lectures as well, particularly those on “The Art of Poetry, Illustrated by Tennyson’s Lyrics.” As with the sermon above, MacDonald would again introduce this principle as his foundation: “The lecturer at the outset endeavoured in a very practical way to instill into the minds of his hearers a more correct opinion of what a poet was than was generally expressed; not, as he said, by any learned means, but by what was true.” (Wingfold Spring 2021.) The report of MacDonald’s Address to the Working Women’s College in 1884 reads in part: “If you would make use of a strong motive power let it be Truth—Truth will subdue all things to its splendidness,” (Wingfold Spring 2010.)

George MacDonald repeatedly emphasized that the story of Jesus presented in the New Testament was the foundation for his Christian beliefs. Much has been written about MacDonald's “mentors,” particularly Alexander John Scott and Frederic Denison Maurice; yet past issues of Wingfold have documented that MacDonald referred to these men as his friends. While he repeatedly expressed his admiration for the spiritual integrity of these two men, along with that of Caleb Morris, I have seen no instance where he credited any of the three with impacting his beliefs; had they done so, I believe MacDonald would have said so. The degree to which MacDonald instead credited in writing the recorded history of Jesus alone for the nature of his Christianity is too detailed for doubt. A letter he wrote to his sister-in-law Charlotte Godwin from Arundel while he was still a practicing Congregational minister, dated Jan. 14, 1853, indicated how early in his career he had held to this view: “May you ever seek to please Christ … How absent are all excludings from his words—how near does he draw us to the Father’s heart! There is nothing to be learnt but from him.” (Wingfold Fall 2019.) The title character of MacDonald’s novel Thomas Wingfold, Curate contemplated one example of reasons for belief in Jesus, regarding the words, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest”:

Did a man ever really utter them? If a man did, either he was the most presumptuous of mortals, or he could do what he said. If he could, then to have seen and distrusted that man, Wingfold felt, would have been to destroy in himself the believing faculty and become incapable of trusting for ever after. (p. 228)

Further evidence of how the words of Jesus impacted MacDonald’s beliefs may often be found in various reports of his extempore sermons. An excellent report of MacDonald’s 1885 sermon in Dumfries reads in part:

There was only one theology that every one must have or perish—Jesus Christ, the Word of God—the theou logos, the very, very Word. Would they tell him that he had no fixed belief when he believed in Jesus Christ only? that he must believe this way or that way? Away with all that. Let Him teach him. He knew what He had taught him—and even that he would not lay on another man’s soul. They should learn from Christ Himself. Don’t take your theology at fiftieth hand, said Dr. MacDonald, take it from Christ Himself.  Their theology was worthless, except it were drawn from obedient following of the Son of Man. They could know nothing but what He taught them. Even though correct, unless He taught it to them it was utterly worthless, and could do them no good. (Wingfold Spring 2020.)

Many people naturally have trouble trusting the Bible as a reliable source of information. MacDonald addressed this concern by applying a type of spiritual logic to his interpretation of the Gospels in the New Testament. C. S. Lewis, who called George MacDonald Master, presented in his book Mere Christianity a so-called trilemma, offering three options for what Jesus must have been: lunatic, liar or Lord. Lewis had added that there was no point in referring to Jesus as merely a good man or a wise spiritual teacher, as so many have done, because His claim to be the Son of God eliminated such options. While Lewis is renowned for this concept, there were several other Christian theologians before him who had written similar comments. An interesting aspect of reports on George MacDonald’s sermons is that he too would often use such a comparison to justify the logic for trusting the portraits of Jesus from the Gospels. Lewis could surely not have seen these long-obscure press reports of MacDonald’s sermons; so the similarities between the two men would seem to be a matter of great minds thinking alike to some degree. I have seen no instance where MacDonald referenced insanity as a possible explanation for Jesus’ claim of divinity; but he did ask congregations to consider that “either Christ was what He said He was, or He told some terrible lies.” (Wingfold Winter 2014.) “If Christ was not what He said—but, he added, he would not finish the sentence; they must do it for themselves. If any man dared to say that Christ said such things, he must be the most presumptuous liar in the face of God, except Christ did say such things, and how a man … whom all good men held to be the best of men, could say such things, if they had not been simply, perfectly, absolutely, eternally true, he could not imagine.” (Wingfold Spring 2014.) The length of MacDonald’s public extempore sermons was such that no press report could do justice to the contents. But his contrast of Liar or Lord surfaces so often in these reports, that this may have been a regular feature of his sermons, regardless of what his chosen scripture text was.

When it comes to belief in a hell of eternal torment, I have found that there are two general categories for Christians: those who believe the Bible teaches this, though they wish it were not so; and those who have no problem with the concept, who appear to enjoy championing the idea by quoting scripture verses in supposed defense of its atrocities. While neither sort of person may be able to help the particular state in which they find themselves at the time, the inevitable effect of claiming to believe in eternal hell surely tends towards the lowered mind that George MacDonald had spoken of. In MacDonald’s 1871 novel Wilfrid Cumbermede, the title character addressed the issue of which was worse—a flawed book, or a flawed God:

Charley had started the question: “How could it be just to harden Pharoah’s heart and then punish him for what came of it?” I, who had been brought up without any superstitious reverence for the Bible, suggested that the narrator of the story might be accountable for the contradiction, and simply that it was not true that God hardened Pharoah’s heart. Strange to say, Charley was rather shocked at this.  He had as yet received the dogma of the infallibility of the Bible without thinking enough about it to question it. Nor did it now occur to him what a small affair it was to find a book fallible, compared with finding the God of whom the book spoke, fallible upon its testimony—for such was surely the dilemma. Men have been able to exist without a Bible: if there be a God it must be in and through Him that all men live. (Chapter XXII, p. 178, David Mackay Pub.)

MacDonald’s best-known written presentation on the immorality of worshipping an evil God based upon the supposed authority of scripture is his chapter “Justice” from Unspoken Sermons III. The contents of this chapter had commenced as a sermon from Shakespeare, later evolving into a public lecture, before being finalized in written format. MacDonald called the notion of eternal punishment administered by Divine right “as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus. It never in truth found place in any heart, though in many a pettifogging brain. There is but one thing lower than deliberately to believe such a lie, and that is to worship the God of whom it is believed.” (p. 126)

Having considered George MacDonald’s beliefs thus far, a point of confusion must naturally arise over how he defined Christian salvation. If humanity is not being saved from eternal hell, what then are we being saved from? MacDonald again addressed this matter in the “Justice” chapter: “The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the consequences of our sins, is a false, mean, low notion. The salvation of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It is a deliverance into the pure air of God’s ways of thinking and feeling … Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; he was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins.” (pp. 132-3) “Rather than think of (God) what in a man would make me avoid him at the risk of my life, I would say, ‘There is no God.’” (p. 146) “He who is true, out and out, will know at once an untruth; and to that vision we all must come.” (p. 149)

There is additional information on how MacDonald regarded divine salvation in some of the press reports of his extempore sermons. An account of his 1867 sermon in Aberdeen, a city whose stern theological tendencies he knew well from having attended university there in the 1840s, reveals that he was risking much in the public defense of his God: “There is no salvation but having God in the heart. The very life of your life; all that is good and true and noble and grand—there is no salvation but that, and that our Lord is moving every one of us to accept. He has done all—except what is still waiting to be done for each individual—that He might get you into His kingdom of light, and love, and truth.” (Wingfold Spring 2008.) The brief report of a sermon MacDonald preached in 1869 contains one of his most moving descriptions of the literal salvation from sin that he advocated: “The only eternal life for a man consisted in unity with the Father as revealed in the Son. Without this, nothing could satisfy a man; with it, he was in heaven already. He knew no other heaven than this, and it might begin below. He supposed there was a paradise somewhere, but it was absurd to suppose that death could lift a man at once into that state of blessedness, unless by this life with and in the Father, and outside of his earthly goods, ready to relinquish them all if God asked it, his heaven had begun in this world.” (Wingfold Spring 2007.) MacDonald believed so ardently in this matter, that he would present similar material in his extempore literary lectures. “Poets,” he reportedly told an 1873 New York audience for his lecture on Robert Burns, “had been singing of a paradise, a millennium that is so far behind us that the date of it is unknown—a region in which, if we could but come, we should be blessed. If they did not know heaven within their souls, they would never know one outside of them.” (Wingfold Spring 2007.)

MacDonald would on occasion reference in his novels the effect upon Christians of regarding salvation as deliverance from God’s presumed condemnation to eternal torture. “I have known people,” he wrote in The Seaboard Parish, “whose power of believing chiefly consisted in their incapacity for seeing difficulties. Of what fine sort a faith must be that is founded in stupidity, or far worse, in indifference to the truth and the mere desire to get out of hell?” (p. 384) A report of MacDonald’s 1868 sermon in his hometown of Huntly indicates that he shared this same concern in detail with old neighbors, friends and relatives:

What do you want? You want to go to Heaven, do you? You have been ten years, five years, twenty years a Christian, and all you have got to yet is the keeping out of hell. If it were revealed to you in a vision that hell was abolished, where would your Christianity be? I know well that it is a poor but holy prudence when a man does not know anything else, to keep out of hell—but to think that you have gone on for years, and your mind never rising above a fear of hell! What do I say? (Wingfold Fall 2005.)

Many of us are accustomed to defining the phrase “eternal life,” used by Jesus, as spending eternity in heaven. George MacDonald repeatedly defined eternal life as a spiritual condition, in keeping with its original translation. “Jesus Christ is my theology, and nothing else,” he reportedly told a London congregation in 1882. “If I can but understand Him, I shall need no other. This is eternal life, to know Him, the true God, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent.” (Wingfold Summer 2014) “The continuation of the present existence for ever would not be eternal life,” MacDonald reportedly told an 1881 congregation. “Oneness with God was eternal life. To have that life was to love the things God loved; to hate the things He hated; to have their lives conformed to Him.” (Wingfold Winter 2014.)

The consistency in George MacDonald’s vast pattern of scattered descriptions regarding a Father and Son who embody perfect love and mercy is astonishing. The following account of the power of Jesus’ divine forgiveness is from his novel Thomas Wingfold, Curate: “... to make all things new and clean, (He) stood up against the whole battery of sin-sprung suffering, withstanding and enduring and stilling the recoil of the awful force wherewith his Father had launched the worlds.” (p. 344) Such passages will inevitably remind one of the reported histories of those who have had near-death encounters with a God who is Love. I do not know if George MacDonald ever had such an experience; but we do know that he came close to dying on multiple occasions. MacDonald's friend the Scottish author Henrietta Keddie related that a doctor responded to the mention of Macdonald’s name by saying, “Why, that man died twenty years ago; I know, for I was consulted in his case, and it was beyond remedy. He cannot be alive now.” (Wingfold Spring 2008.) A letter from MacDonald's father George Senior to George’s wife Louisa, dated 26 November 1855, revealed that her husband had suffered a severe hemorrhage of the lungs on November 25, 1855, shortly after having become minister for a small congregation in Bolton:

The tidings of last night about George has greatly distressed and alarmed us. I am sure your own state of mind is very agonizing. How can it be otherwise with us all considering what has heretofore been the issue of such attacks in the lungs. The telegraph which reached me a few minutes ago—2 P.M.—gives more favourable news than its predecessor did in the morning so that there many still be hope connected with his case. (Wingfold Fall 2015.)

But the 1855 attack would leave George MacDonald unable to work, preach or lecture for well over a year, and that blow would not be the last close call he endured as the years went on. It has always seemed likely to me that MacDonald had a near-death experience at some point: it is difficult to know what else might have given him such unshakeable faith in a God of pure love and mercy. While near-death encounters may not have been spoken of so openly in the 19th century, George MacDonald’s awareness of this phenomenon is illustrated in his 1881 novel Weighed and Wanting. In chapter XXIX, the young boy Mark Raymount nearly drowns. “(Mark) thought he was dead; that God had sent for him home … He told his mother not to mind, for he was not going away yet. He had been told that under the water, he said.” (p. 303-4, Johannesen Pub.)

  Because George MacDonald’s literary reputation now rests largely upon his fairy tales and fantasies, and because his numerous novels often had happy romantic endings, his views of Christianity are sometimes regarded as the result of a naïve and excessively optimistic nature. But such a conclusion shows an ignorance of MacDonald’s family history, which is easily available to examine in various biographies. He was raised by a father who had lost a leg to tuberculosis, his mother having died when he was a child, and he saw the early deaths of multiple brothers and a stepsister. In later years, George and Louisa MacDonald had to endure the deaths of four of their eleven children.

Regarding George MacDonald as “too idealistic” to accept conventional Christianity, as someone once wrote, also betrays an unfamiliarity with the nature of his lengthy career as a lecturer. While MacDonald did lecture on occasion upon Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, as one might suppose from his own literature, the most frequent subject in his vast lecture repertoire was Hamlet, closely followed by Macbeth, with King Lear, Julius Caesar and Timon of Athens offered as well. Press reports of these extempore lectures indicate the unflinching detail in which MacDonald would publicly dissect over a two-hour period the nature of what it means to be a murderer, the motivations for suicide, the outcome of adultery, the descent into grotesque selfishness, blinding hatred, superstition, or madness, among casts of characters left “crawling between earth and heaven.” A summary of MacDonald’s 1869 lecture on Macbeth reads in part:

They would be equally wrong if they condemned any play or poem … because the story of it was unpleasant. They must take human facts as they found them. The only question was, how did they deal with them?

George MacDonald once reportedly told a congregation, “You cannot have God in you and He not shine out of you; it is impossible.” (Wingfold Spring 2010.) What sort of concept must anyone have about God, to make such a claim? Such statements can only be the result of belief in a God who is purely good, who intends that all His creation will unite with Him. It is the vision of someone who has properly nurtured within himself the true essence of what he called “the believing faculty.”

Barbara Amell has published Wingfold, a quarterly journal that restores material by and about George MacDonald, since 1993.