George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis) EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY C. S. LEWIS TO MARY NEYLAN C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology" Language: English Date: Jan 9, 2003 Izd: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., NEW YORK, 1978 OCR: Dmitrij Mashkovskij Spellcheck: Dmitrij Mashkovskij, Jan 9, 2003 "George MacDonald. An Antology" EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY C. S. LEWIS TO MARY NEYLAN CONTENTS 1 Dryness 2 Inexorable Love 3 Divine Burning 4 The Beginning of Wisdom 5 The Unawakened 6 Sinai 7 No 8 The Law of Nature 9 Escape Is Hopeless 10 The Word 11 I Knew a Child 12 Spiritual Murder 13 Impossibilities 14 Truth Is Truth 15 The White Stone 16 Personality 17 The Secret in Man 18 The Secrets in God 19 No Massing 20 No Comparing 21 The End 22 Moth and Rust 23 Caverns and Films 24 Various Kinds of Moth 25 Holy Scriptures 26 Command That These Stones Be Made Bread 27 Religious Feeling 28 Dryness 29 Presumption 30 The Knowledge of God 31 The Passion 32 Eli, Eli 33 The Same 34 Vicarious Desolation 35 Creeping Christians 36 Dryness 37 The Use of Dryness 38 The Highest Condition of the Human Will 39 Troubled Soul 40 Dangerous Moment 41 It Is Finished 42 Members of One Another 43 Originality 44 The Moral Law 45 The Same 46 Upward toward the Center 47 No One Loves Because He Sees Why 48 My Neighbor 49 The Same 50 What Cannot Be Loved 51 Lore and Justice 52 The Body 53 Goodness 54 Christ's Disregards 55 Easy to Please and Hard to Satisfy 56 The Moral Law 57 Bondage 58 The Rich Young Man 59 Law and Spirit 60 Our Nonage 61 Knowledge 62 Living Forever 63 Be Ye Perfect 64 Carrion Comfort 65 The Same 66 How Hard? 67 Things 68 Possession 69 The Torment of Death 70 The Utility of Death 71 Not the Rich Only 72 Fearful Thinking 73 Miracles 74 The Sacred Present 75 Forethought 76 Not the Rich Only 77 Care 78 The Sacred Present 79 Heaven 80 Shaky Foundations 81 Fussing 82 Housekeeping 83 Cares 84 God at the Door 85 Difficulties 86 Vain Vigilance 87 Incompleteness 88 Prayer 89 Knowledge That Would Be Useless 90 Prayer 91 Why Should It Be Necessary? 92 The Conditions of a Good Gift 93 False Spirituality 94 Small Prayers 95 Riches and Need 96 Providence 97 Divine Freedom 98 Providence 99 The Miracles of Our Lord 100 They Have No Wine 101 Intercessory Prayer 102 The Eternal Revolt 103 They .Say It Does Them Good 104 Perfected Prayer 105 Corrective Granting 106 Why We Must Wait 107 Gods Vengeance 108 The Way of Understanding 109 Penal Blindness 111 Agree with the Adversary Quickly 112 The Inexorable 113 Christ Our Righteousness 114 Agree Quickly 115 Duties to an Enemy 116 The Prison 117 Not Good to Be Alone 118 Be Ye Perfect 119 The Heart 120 Precious Blame 121 The Same 122 Man Glorified 123 Life in the Word 124 The Office of Christ 125 The Slowness of the New Creation 126 The New Creation 127 Pessimism 128 The Work of the Father 129 The End 130 Deadlock 131 The Two Worst Heresies 132 Christian Growth 133 Life and Shadow 134 False Refuge 135 A Silly Notion 136 Dryness 137 Perseverance 138 The Lower Forms 139 Life 140 The Eternal Round 141 The Great One Life 142 The Beginning of Wisdom 143 "Peace in Our Time" 144 Divine Fire 145 The Safe Place 146 God and Death 147 Terror 148 False Want 149 A Man's Right 150 Nature 151 The Same 152 Doubt 153 Job 154 The Close of the Book of Job 155 The Way 156 Self-Control 157 Self-Dental 158 Killing the Nerve 159 Self 160 My Yoke Is Easy 161 We Must Be Jealous 162 Facing Both Ways 163 The Careless Soul 164 There Is No Merit in It 165 Faith 166 The Misguided 167 The Way 168 The First and Second Persons 169 Warning 170 Creation 171 The Unknowable 172 Warning 173 The Two First Persons 174 The Imitation of Christ 175 Pain and Joy 176 "By Him All Things Consist" 177 "In Him Was Life" 178 Why We Have Not Christs "Ipsissima Verba" 179 Warning 180 On Bad Religious Art 181 How to Read the Epistles 182 The Entrance of Christ 183 The Same 184 The Uses of Nature 185 Natural Science 186 The Value of Analysis 187 Nature 188 Water 189 Truth of Things 190 Caution 191 Duties 192 Why free Will Was Permitted 193 Eternal Death 194 The Redemption of Our Nature 195 No Mystery 196 The Live Truth 197 Likeness to Christ 198 Grace and Freedom 199 Glorious Liberty 200 No Middle Way 201 On Having One's Own Way 202 The Death of Christ 203 Hell 204 The Lie 205 The Author's Fear 206 Sincerity 207 First Things First 208 Inexorable Love 209 Salvation 210 Charity and Orthodoxy 211 Evasion 212 Inexorable Love 213 The Holy Ghost 214 The Sense of Sin 215 Mean Theologies 216 On Believing III of God 217 Condemnation 218 Excuses 219 Impossibilities 220 Disobedience 221 The Same 222 The God of Remembrance 223 Bereavement 224 Abraham's Faith 225 The Same 226 Perception of Duties 227 Righteousness of Faith 228 The Same 229 Reckoned unto Us for Righteousness 230 St. Paul's Faith 231 The Full-Grown Christian 232 Revealed to Babes 233 Answer 234 Useless Knowledge 235 The Art of Being Created 236 When We Do Not Find Him 237 Prayer 238 On One's Critics 239 Free Will 240 On Idle Tongues 241 Do We Love Light? 242 Shame 243 The Wakening 244 The Wakening of the Rich 245 Self-Deception 246 Warning 247 The Slow Descent 248 Justice and Revenge 249 Recognition Hereafter 250 From Dante 251 What God Means by "Good" 252 All Things from God 253 Absolute Being 254 Beasts 255 Diversity of Souls 256 The Disillusioned 257 Evil 258 The Loss of the Shadow 259 Love 260 From Spring to Summer 261 The Door into Life 262 A Lonely Religion 263 Love 264 A False Method 265 Assimilation 266 Looking 267 Progress 268 Providence 269 Ordinariness 270 Forgiveness 271 Visitors 272 Prose 273 Integrity 274 Contentment 275 Psychical Research 276 The Blotting Out 277 On a Chapter in Isaiah 278 Providence 279 No Other Way 280 Death 281 Criterion of a True Vision 282 One Reason for Sex 283 Easy Work 284 Lebensraum 285 Nature 286 For Parents 287 Hoarding 288 Today and Yesterday 289 Obstinate Illusion 290 Possessions 291 Lost in the Mountains 292 The Birth of Persecution 293 Daily Death 294 On Duty to Oneself 295 A Theory of Sleep 296 Sacred Idleness 297 The Modern Bane 298 Immortality 299 Prayer 300 Self 301 Visions 302 The Impervious Soul 303 An Old Garden 304 Experience 305 Difficulties 306 A Hard Saying 307 Truisms 308 On Asking Advice 309 No Heel Taps 310 Silence Before the Judge 311 Nothing So Deadening 312 Rounding and Completion 313 Immortality 314 The Eternal Now 315 The Silences Below 316 Dipsomania 317 Reminder 318 Things Rare and Common 319 Holy Laughter 320 The Self 321 Either-Or 322 Prayer 323 A Bad Conscience 324 Money 325 Scrubbing the Cell 326 The Mystery of Evil 327 Prudence 328 Competition 329 Method 330 Prudence 331 How To Become a Dunce 332 Love 333 Preacher's Repentance 334 Deeds 335 Prayer 336 The House Is Not for Me 337 Hoarding 338 The Day's First Job 339 Obstinate Illusion 340 The Rules of Conversation 341 A Neglected Form of Justice 342 Good 343 Thou Shall Not Make Any Graven Image 344 How to Become a Dunce 345 Our Insolvency 346 A Sad Pity 14* 347 On Method 348 Wishing 349 Fear 350 The Root of All Rebellion 351 Two Silly Young Women 352 Hospitality 353 Boredom 354 Counting the Cost 355 Realism 356 Avarice 357 The Lobster Pot 358 The First Meeting 359 Reminder 360 The Wrong Way with Anxiety 361 Deadlock 362 Solitude 363 Death 364 The Mystery of Evil 365 The Last Resource Sources Bibliography PREFACE all that I know of George MacDonald I have learned either from his own books or from the biography (George MacDonald and His Wife) which his son, Dr. Greville MacDonald, published in 1924; nor have I ever, but once, talked of him to anyone who had met him. For the very few facts which I am going to mention I am therefore entirely dependent on Dr. MacDonald. We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man's early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central. His father appears to have been a remarkable man - a man hard, and tender, and humorous all at once, in the old fashion of Scotch Christianity. He had had his leg cut off above the knee in the days before chloroform, refusing the customary dose of preliminary whisky, and "only for one moment, when the knife first transfixed the flesh, did he turn his face away and ejaculate a faint, sibilant whiff." He had quelled with a fantastic joke at his own expense an ugly riot in which he was being burned in effigy. He forbade his son to touch a saddle until he had learned to ride well without one. He advised him "to give over the fruitless game of poetry." He asked from him, and obtained, a promise to renounce tobacco at the age of twenty-three. On the other hand he objected to grouse shooting on the score of cruelty and had in general a tenderness for animals not very usual among farmers more than a hundred years ago; and his son reports that he never, as boy or man, asked him for anything without getting what he asked. Doubtless this tells us as much about the son's character as the father's and should be taken in connection with our extract on prayer (104). "He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss." The theological maxim is rooted in the experiences of the author's childhood. This is what may be called the "anti-Freudian predicament" in operation. George MacDonald's family (though hardly his father) were of course Calvinists. On the intellectual side his history is largely a history of escape from the theology in which he had been brought up. Stories of such emancipation are common in the nineteenth century; but George MacDonald's story belongs to this familiar pattern only with a difference. In most such stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines, comes also to hate the persons, of his forebears, and even the whole culture and way of life with which they are associated. Thus books like The Way of All flesh come to be written; and later generations, if they do not swallow the satire wholesale as history, at least excuse the author for a one-sidedness which a man in his circumstances could hardly have been expected to avoid. Of such personal resentment I find no trace in MacDonald. It is not we who have to find extenuating circumstances for his point of view. On the contrary, it is he himself, in the very midst of his intellectual revolt, who forces us, whether we will or no, to see elements of real and perhaps irreplaceable worth in the thing from which he is revolting. All his life he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn. All that is best in his novels carries us back to that "kaleyard" world of granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery, the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, and the passionate love of hard-won learning. His best characters are those which reveal how much real charity and spiritual wisdom can coexist with the profession of a theology that seems to encourage neither. His own grandmother, a truly terrible old woman wo had burnt his uncle's fiddle as a Satanic snare, might well have appeared to him as what is now (inaccurately) called "a mere sadist." Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert Falconer and again in What's Mine's Mine, we are compelled to look deeper-to see, inside the repellent crust, something that we can wholeheartedly pity and even, with reservations, respect. In this way MacDonald illustrates, not the doubtful maxim that to know all is to forgive all, but the unshakeable truth that to forgive is to know. He who loves, sees. He was born in 1824 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire and entered King's College at Aberdeen in 1840. In 1842 he spent some months in the North of Scotland cataloguing the library of a great house which has never been identified. I mention the fact because it made a lifelong impression on MacDonald. The image of a great house seen principally from the library and always through the eyes of a stranger or a dependent (even Mr. Vane in Lilith never seems at home in the library which is called his) haunts his books to the end. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the "great house in the North" was the scene of some important crisis or development in his life. Perhaps it was here that he first came under the influence of German Romanticism. In 1850 he received what is technically known as a "Call" to become the Minister of a dissenting chapel in Arundel. By 1852 he was in trouble with the "deacons" for heresy, the charges being that he had expressed belief in a future state of probation for heathens and that he was tainted with German theology. The deacons took a roundabout method to be rid of him, by lowering his salary-it had been £150 a year and he was now married-in the hope that this would induce him to resign. But they had misjudged their man. MacDonald merely replied that this was bad enough news for him but that he supposed he must try to live on less. And for some time he continued to do so, often helped by the offerings of his poorest parishioners who did not share the views of the more prosperous Deacons. In 1853, however, the situation became impossible. He resigned and embarked on the career of lecturing, tutoring, occasional preaching, writing, and "odd jobs" which was his lot almost to the end. He died in 1905. His lungs were diseased and his poverty was very great. Literal starvation was sometimes averted only by those last moment deliverances which agnostics attribute to chance and Christians to Providence. It is against this background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that some of the following extracts can be most profitably read. His resolute condemnations of anxiety come from one who has a right to speak; nor does their tone encourage the theory that they owe anything to the pathological wishful thinking-the spes phthisica-of the consumptive. None of the evidence suggests such a character. His peace of mind came not from building on the future but from resting in what he called "the holy Present." His resignation to poverty (see Number 274) was at the opposite pole from that of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can buy, and no less deeply content to do without them. It is perhaps significant-it is certainly touching-that his chief recorded weakness was a Highland love of finery; and he was all his life hospitable as only the poor can be. In making these extracts I have been concerned with MacDonald not as a writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank- perhaps not even in its second. There are indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise, weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid ornament (it runs right through them from Dunbar to the Waverly Novels), sometimes an oversweetness picked up from Novalis. But this does not quite dispose of him even for the literary critic. What he does best is fantasy-fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art-the art of myth-making-is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version-whose words-are we thinking when we say this? For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone's -words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all-say by a mime, or a film. And I find this to be true of all such stories. When I think of the story of the Argonauts and praise it, I am not praising Apollonius Rhodius (whom I never finished) nor Kingsley (whom I have forgotten) nor even Morris, though I consider his version a very pleasant poem. In this respect stories of the mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to take the "theme" of Keats's Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a fake abstraction. But in a myth-in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters-this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, "done the trick." After that you can throw the means of communication away. To be sure, if the means of communication are words, it is desirable that a letter which brings you important news should be fairly written. But this is only a minor convenience; for the letter will, in any case, go into the wastepaper basket as soon as you have mastered its contents, and the words (those of Lempriere would have done) are going to be forgotten as soon as you have mastered the Myth. In poetry the words are the body and the "theme" or "content" is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes-they are not much more than a telephone. Of this I had evidence some years ago when I first heard the story of Kafka's Castle related in conversation and afterwards read the book for myself. The reading added nothing. I had already received the myth, which was all that mattered. Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius-a Kafka or a Novalis-who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. But I do not know how to classify such genius. To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words-nay, since its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored. It may even be one of the greatest arts; for it produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets. It is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry-or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and "possessed joys not promised to our birth." It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives. It was in this mythopoeic art that MacDonald excelled. And from this it follows that his best art is least represented in this collection. The great works are Phantastes, the Curdie books, The Golden Key, The Wise Woman, and Lilith. From them, just because they are supremely good in their own kind, there is little to be extracted. The meaning, the suggestion, the radiance, is incarnate in the whole story: it is only by chance that you find any detachable merits. The novels, on the other hand, have yielded me a rich crop. This does not mean that they are good novels. Necessity made MacDonald a novelist, but few of his novels are good and none is very good. They are best when they depart most from the canons of novel writing, and that in two directions. Sometimes they depart in order to come nearer to fantasy, as in the whole character of the hero in Sir Gibbie or the opening chapters of Wilfred Cumbermede. Sometimes they diverge into direct and prolonged preachments which would be intolerable if a man were reading for the story, but which are in fact welcome because the author, though a poor novelist, is a supreme preacher. Some of his best things are thus hidden in his dullest books: my task here has been almost one of exhumation. I am speaking so far of the novels as I think they would appear if judged by any reasonably objective standard. But it is, no doubt, true that any reader who loves holiness and loves MacDonald-yet perhaps he will need to love Scotland too-can find even in the worst of them something that disarms criticism and will come to feel a queer, awkward charm in their very faults. (But that, of course, is what happens to us with all favorite authors.) One rare, and all but unique, merit these novels must be allowed. The "good" characters are always the best and most convincing. His saints live; his villains are stagey. This collection, as I have said, was designed not to revive MacDonald's literary reputation but to spread his religious teaching. Hence most of my extracts are taken from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help-sometimes indispensable help toward the very acceptance of the Christian faith. I will attempt no historical or theological classification of MacDonald's thought, partly because I have not the learning to do so, still more because I am no great friend to such pigeonholing. One very effective way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest when we have murmured "Thomist," "Barthian," or "Existentialist." And in Mac-Donald it is always the voice of conscience that speaks. He addresses the will: the demand for obedience, for "something to be neither more nor less nor other than done" is incessant. Yet in that very voice of conscience every other faculty somehow speaks as well-intellect, and imagination, and humor, and fancy, and all the affections; and no man in modern times was perhaps more aware of the distinction between Law and Gospel, the inevitable failure of mere morality. The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined. The title "Inexorable Love" which I have given to several individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability-but never the inexorability of anything less than love-runs through it like a refrain; "escape is hopeless"-"agree quickly with your adversary"-"compulsion waits behind"-"the uttermost farthing will be exacted." Yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so. MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) "He threatens terrible things if we will not be happy." In many respects MacDonald's thought has, in a high degree, just those excellences which his period and his personal history would lead us to expect least. A romantic, escaping from a drily intellectual theology, might easily be betrayed into valuing mere emotion and "religious experience" too highly: but in fact few nineteenth-century writers are more firmly catholic in relegating feeling to its proper place. (See Numbers 1, 27, 28, 37, 39, 351.) His whole philosophy of Nature (Numbers 52, 67, 150, 151, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 285) with its resolute insistence on the concrete, owes little to the thought of an age which hovered between mechanism and idealism; he would obviously have been more at home with Professor Whitehead than with Herbert Spencer or T. H. Green. Number 285 seems to me particularly admirable. All romantics are vividly aware of mutability, but most of them are content to bewail it: for MacDonald this nostalgia is merely the starting point-he goes on and discovers what it is made for. His psychology also is worth noticing: he is quite as well aware as the moderns that the conscious self, the thing revealed by introspection, is a superficies. Hence the cellars and attics of the King's castle in The Princess and the Goblins, and the terror of his own house which falls upon Mr. Vane in Lilith: hence also his formidable critique (201) of our daily assumptions about the self. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the function-a low and primitive, yet often indispensable function-which he allows to Fear in the spiritual life (Numbers 3, 5, 6, 7, 137, 142, 143, 349). Reaction against early teachings might on this point have very easily driven him into a shallow liberalism. But it does not. He hopes, indeed, that all men will be saved; but that is because he hopes that all will repent. He knows (none better) that even omnipotence cannot save the uncoverted. He never trifles with eternal impossibilities. He is as golden and genial as Traherne; but also as astringent as the Imitation. So at least I have found him. In making this collection I was discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasize it. And even if honesty did not-well, I am a don, and "source-hunting" (Quellenforschung) is perhaps in my marrow. It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought-almost unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected it on a dozen previous occasions-the Everyman edition of Phantasies. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantasies was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men. But when the process was complete-by which, of course, I mean "when it had really begun"-I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied me all the way and that I was now at last ready to hear from him much that he could not have told me at that first meeting. But in a sense, what he was now telling me was the very same that he had told me from the beginning. There was no question of getting through to the kernel and throwing away the shell: no question of a gilded pill. The pill was gold all through. The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception. The deception is all the other way round-in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from "the land of righteousness," never reveals that elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire-the thing (in Sappho's phrase) "more gold than gold." It is no part of my aim to produce a critical text of MacDonald. Apart from my unconscious errors in transcription, I have "tampered" in two ways. The whole difficulty of making extracts is to leave the sense perfectly clear while not retaining anything you do not want. In attempting to do so, I have sometimes interpolated a word (always enclosed in brackets) and sometimes altered the punctuation. I have also introduced a capital H for pronouns that refer to God, which the printer, in some of my originals, did not employ; not because I consider this typographical reverence of much importance, but because, in a language where pronouns are so easily confused as they are in English, it seems foolish to reject such an aid to clarity. - C. S. lewis GEORGE MACDONALD AN ANTHOLOGY [ 1 ] Dryness That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, "Thou art my refuge."* * The source of this quotation and of the subsequent quotations will be found in "Sources," [ 2 ] Inexorable Love Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy. . . . For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected-not in itself, but in the object. . . . Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. [ 3 ] Divine Burning He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: he is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God. [ 4 ] The Beginning of Wisdom How should the Hebrews be other than terrified at that which was opposed to all they knew of themselves, beings judging it good to honor a golden calf? Such as they were, they did well to be afraid. ... Fear is nobler than sensuality. Fear is better than no God, better than a god made with hands. ... The worship of fear is true, although very low: and though not acceptable to God in itself, for only the worship of spirit and of truth is acceptable to Him, yet even in his sight it is precious. For He regards men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, toward that image after which He made them that they might grow to it. Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress. A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint. [ 5 ] The Unawakened Can it be any comfort to them to be told that God loves them so that He will burn them clean? . . . They do not want to be clean, and they cannot bear to be tortured. [ 6 ] Sinai And is not God ready to do unto them even as they fear, though with another feeling and a different end from any which they are capable of supposing? He is against sin: insofar as, and while, they and sin are one, He is against them-against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their hopes; and thus He is altogether and always for them. That thunder and lightning and tempest, that blackness torn with the sound of a trumpet, that visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was all but a faint image ... of what God thinks and feels against vileness and selfishness, of the unrest of unassuageable repulsion with which He regards such conditions. [ 7 ] No When we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of Him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more. . . . The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear. [ 8 ] The Law of Nature For that which cannot be shaken shall remain. That which is immortal in God shall remain in man. The death that is in them shall be consumed. It is the law of Nature- that is, the law of God-that all that is destructible shall be destroyed. [ 9 ] Escape Is Hopeless The man whose deeds are evil, fears the burning. But the burning will not come the less that he fears it or denies it. Escape is hopeless. For Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come out till he has paid the uttermost farthing. [ 10 ] The Word But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him. [ 11 ] I Knew a Child I knew a child who believed she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, because she had, in her toilette, made an improper use of a pin. Dare not to rebuke me for adducing the diseased fancy of a child in a weighty matter of theology. "Despise not one of these little ones." Would the theologians were as near the truth in such matters as the children. Diseased fancy! The child knew, and was conscious that she knew, that she was doing wrong because she had been forbidden. There was rational ground for her fear. . . . He would not have told her she was silly, and "never to mind." Child as she was, might He not have said to her, "I do not condemn thee: and go and sin no more"? [12] Spiritual Murder It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated. [ 13 ] Impossibilities No man who will not forgive his neighbor, can believe that God is willing, yea wanting, to forgive him.... If God said, "I forgive you" to a man who hated his brother, and if (as impossible) that voice of forgiveness should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How much would the man interpret it? Would it not mean to him "You may go on hating. I do not mind it. You have had great provocation and are justified in your hate"? No doubt God takes what wrong there is, and what provocation there is, into the account: but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the hate, the more reason, if possible, that the hater should be delivered from the hell of his hate. . . . The man would think, not that God loved the sinner, but that he forgave the sin, which God never does [i.e. What is usually called "forgiving the sin" means forgiving the sinner and destroying the sin]. Every sin meets with its due fate-inexorable expulsion from the paradise of God's Humanity. He loves the sinner so much that He cannot forgive him in any