 
365 Meditations from  
George MacDonald's  
Fiction

Edited by Dr. David Scott Wilson-Okamura

This selection, including the preface and titles, is copyright 2014 by David Scott Wilson-Okamura at Smashwords. You have permission to _distribute_ its contents. You do not have permission to _sell_ it.

# Table of Contents

Preface

Meditations

Bibliography (from Wikipedia, "George MacDonald")

# Preface

This book was inspired by _George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings_ , edited by C. S. Lewis (1946). Readers who seek an account of MacDonald's life will find one there, or in Roland Hein's _George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker_ (1993). A selection of MacDonald's letters, _An Expression of Character: The Letters of George MacDonald_ (1994), has been edited by Glenn Edward Sadler. Most, perhaps all, of MacDonald's own writings are available free on the internet, many in Kindle format; the bibliography from Wikipedia's "George MacDonald" page can be found at the end of this little book.

Lewis's anthology is still the best introduction to MacDonald's ideas. The bulk of it comes from one book: the _Unspoken Sermons_ (1st series 1867, 2nd series 1885, 3rd series 1889). This is entirely meet and proper, and anyone who reads this collection and wants to learn more should read the _Sermons_ next. But MacDonald also wrote a bushelful of novels, in addition to the fantasy books, _Phantastes_ and _Lilith_ , that he is still known for. All of MacDonald's work was written under financial pressure – he was struggling to support a large family – but the novels show the strain more quickly. Lewis's judgement of them was severe but correct: "few of his novels are good and none is very good" (xxxiii). Having read them all, over a period of two years, I cannot disagree; nor can I recommend them to my own students as novels. To date, I have never taught them in a class.

What is their value then, if not literary? In one sentence: I believe they can help people to find, know, and trust God. They are populated with something rare in fiction: good people who are also good characters. They do not shy away from hard times or hard questions. Some are old, many are young, but they are all versions of the same idea: God is our father and can be trusted.

# New Year

The winter is the childhood of the year....It is as if God spoke to each of us according to our need: My son, my daughter, you are growing old and cunning; you must grow a child again, with my son, this blessed birth-time. You are growing old and selfish; you must become a child. You are growing old and careful; you must become a child. You are growing old and distrustful; you must become a child. You are growing old and petty, and weak, and foolish; you must become a child – my child...

_Adela Cathcart_ , vol. 1, ch. 2

# Winter

It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His – the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness – even "the winter of our discontent."

_Adela Cathcart_ , vol. 1, ch. 2

# Human necessities

"It should not be required of a curate to give money," said Adela. "Do you grudge him the blessedness of giving, Adela?" "Oh, no. I only think it is too hard on him." "It is as necessary for a poor man to give away, as for a rich man."

_Adela Cathcart_ , vol. 2, ch. 3

# Perseverance

In some measure to endure is to conquer and destroy.

_Adela Cathcart_ , vol. 2, ch. 6

# Bedside manner

Patients are more like musical instruments than machines.

_Adela Cathcart_ , vol. 3, ch. 4

# Second childhood (I)

Who has not seen, as the infirmities of age grow upon old men, the haughty, self-reliant spirit that had neglected, if not despised the gentle ministrations of love, grow as it were a little scared, and begin to look about for some kindness; begin to return the warm pressure of the hand, and to submit to be waited upon by the anxiety of love? Not in weakness alone comes the second childhood upon men, but often in childlikeness...

_Adela Cathcart_ , vol. 3, ch. 7

# Arguing (I)

It is a principle of mine never to push anything over the edge. When I am successful, in any argument, my one dread is of humiliating my opponent. Indeed I cannot bear it. It humiliates me. And if you want him to think about anything, you must leave him room...Let him have a hand in the convincing of himself. I have been surprised sometimes to see my own arguments come up fresh and green, when I thought the fowls of the air had devoured them up.

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 4

# Arguing (II)

The defeat of the intellect is not the object in fighting with the sword of the Spirit, but the acceptance of the heart. In this case, therefore, I drew back.

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 4

# Doubt (I)

A man may be on the way to the truth, just in virtue of his doubting.

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 4

# Misreading (I)

As you will hear some people read poetry so that no mortal could tell it was poetry, so do some people read their own lives and those of others.

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 7

# Not waiting (I)

When I thought of a thing and had concluded it might do, I very seldom put off the consequent action. I found I was wrong sometimes, and that the particular action did no good; but thus movement was kept up in my operative nature, preventing it from sinking towards the inactivity to which I was but too much inclined. Besides, to find out what will not do, is a step towards finding out what will do. Moreover, an attempt in itself unsuccessful may set something or other in motion that will help.

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 21

# Amo ut intelligam (I)

Intelligence is a consequence of love; nor is there any true intelligence without it.

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 28

# Repose

So I turned and lingered by the old mill, and fell a pondering on the profusion of strength that rushed past the wheel away to the great sea, doing nothing. "Nature," I thought, "does not demand that power should always be force. Power itself must repose. He that believeth shall not make haste, says the Bible. But it needs strength to be still. Is my faith not strong enough to be still?" I looked up to the heavens once more, and the quietness of the stars seemed to reproach me. "We are safe up here," they seemed to say: "we shine, fearless and confident, for the God who gave the primrose its rough leaves to hide it from the blast of uneven spring, hangs us in the awful hollows of space. We cannot fall out of His safety."

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 29

# Outside things

When outside things, such as pain or loss of work, or difficulty in getting money, were referred to God and His will, they too straightway became spiritual affairs, for nothing in the world could any longer appear common or unclean to the man who saw God in everything.

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 30

# Good luck

"You _will_ be the better for it," he returned. "I believe I've allus been the better for any trouble as ever I had to go through with. I couldn't quite say the same for every bit of good luck I had; leastways, I consider trouble the best luck a man can have."

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 33

# Preparing for darkness

I know that my mental faculty is growing weaker, but some power yet remains; and I say to myself, "Perhaps this is the final trial of your faith – to trust in God to take care of your intellect for you, and to believe, in weakness, the truths He revealed to you in strength. Remember that Truth depends not upon your seeing it, and believe as you saw when your sight was at its best. For then you saw that the Truth was beyond all you could see." Thus I try to prepare for dark days that may come, but which cannot come without God in them.

_Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ , ch. 34

# Intellectual pride

He had the weakness of being proud of small discoveries – the tinier the better; and was always sharpening his senses, as well as his intellect, to a fine point, in order to make them. I fear that by these means he shut out some great ones, which could not enter during such a concentration of the faculties.

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 1, ch. 9

# Timing (I)

Hugh learned from this a little lesson about divine law which he never forgot. "Now, Harry," added he, "you must not open a book till I allow you." "No poetry, either?" said poor Harry; and his face fell. "I don't mind poetry so much; but of prose I will read as much to you as will be good for you. Come, let us have a bit of Gulliver again." "Oh, how delightful!" cried Harry. "I am so glad you made me put away that tiresome book. I wonder why it insisted so on being read."

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 1, ch. 4

# Space

For my part, it would make me miserable to think that there was nothing but what I could understand. I should feel as if I had no room anywhere.

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 1, ch. 4

# Church

Mr. Arnold opined that people should not go to church to hear sermons, but to make the responses; whoever read prayers, it made no difference, for the prayers were the Church's, not the parson's.

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 2, ch. 12

# Dagger of the mind

Contempt is murder committed by the intellect, as hatred is murder committed by the heart.

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 3, ch. 9

# Behold, the kingdom of God

The kingdom of heaven is not come, even when God's will is our law: it is come when God's will is our will.

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 2, ch. 12

# Proverbs

The rich easily learn the wisdom of Solomon, but are unapt scholars of him who is greater than Solomon.

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 2, ch. 21

# Purgatory

She was dying, and Margaret was the angel of life watching over her. "I shall get rid of my lameness there, Margaret, shall I not?" said Euphra, one day, half playfully. "Yes, dear." "It will be delightful to walk again without pain." "Perhaps you will not get rid of it all at once, though." "Why do you think so?" asked Euphra, with some appearance of uneasiness. "Because, if it is taken from you before you are quite willing to have it as long as God pleases, by and by you will not be able to rest, till you have asked for it back again, that you may bear it for his sake." "I am willing, Margaret, I am willing. Only one can't like it, you know." "I know that," answered Margaret. She spoke no more, and Margaret heard her weeping gently. Half an hour had passed away, when she looked up, and said: "Margaret, dear, I begin to like my lameness, I think." "Why, dear?" "Why, just because God made it, and bade me bear it. May I not think it is a mark on me from his hand?" "Yes, I think so." "Why do you think it came on me?" "To walk back to Him with, dear."

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 3, ch. 22

# Sorrow and repentance

Sorrow for loss brought in her train sorrow for wrong – a sister more solemn still, and with a deeper blessing in the voice of her loving farewell. – It is a great mistake to suppose that sorrow is a part of repentance. It is far too good a grace to come so easily. A man may repent, that is, think better of it, and change his way, and be very much of a Pharisee – I do not say a hypocrite – for a long time after: it needs a saint to be sorrowful. Yet repentance is generally the road to this sorrow.

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 3, ch. 23

# Timing (II)

Experience had now brought him up to the point where he could begin to profit by David's communion; he needed the things which David could teach him; and David began forthwith to give them to him.

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 3, ch. 23

# Waiting (I)

Didna Dawvid aye say, "Gie the lad time, woman. It's unco chaip, for the Lord's aye makin't. The best things is aye the maist plentifu'. Gie the lad time, my bonny woman!"

_David Elginbrod_ , vol. 3, ch. 23

# God's way (I)

Where a man would make a machine, or a picture, or a book, God makes the man that makes the book, or the picture, or the machine. Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespere. Or would he construct a drama more immediately his own? He begins with the building of the stage itself, and that stage is a world – a universe of worlds. He makes the actors, and they do not act, – they are their part. He utters them into the visible to work out their life – his drama. When he would have an epic, he sends a thinking hero into his drama, and the epic is the soliloquy of his Hamlet. Instead of writing his lyrics, he sets his birds and his maidens a-singing. All the processes of the ages are God's science; all the flow of history is his poetry. His sculpture is not in marble, but in living and speech-giving forms, which pass away, not to yield place to those that come after, but to be perfected in a nobler studio. What he has done remains, although it vanishes; and he never either forgets what he has once done, or does it even once again.

"The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture"

# The so-called pathetic fallacy

The forms of Nature are the representations of human thought in virtue of their being the embodiment of God's thought.

"The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture"

# Mirrors (I)

No man is capable of seeing for himself the whole of any truth: he needs it echoed back to him from every soul in the universe; and still its centre is hid in the Father of Lights.

"The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture"

# Owning books

Donal desired to be useful and live for his generation, also to be with books. To be where was a good library would suit him better than buying books, for without a place in which to keep them, they are among the impedimenta of life. And Donal knew that in regard to books he was in danger of loving after the fashion of this world: books he had a strong inclination to accumulate and hoard; therefore the use of a library was better than the means of buying them. Books as possessions are also of the things that pass and perish – as surely as any other form of earthly having; they are of the playthings God lets men have that they may learn to distinguish between apparent and real possession: if having will not teach them, loss may.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 1

# Judging sermons

"Yon was a fine discoorse," remarked the cobbler as they went homeward. Donal saw nothing fine in it, but his experience was not so wide as the cobbler's: to him the discourse had hinted many things which had not occurred to Donal. Some people demand from the householder none but new things, others none but old; whereas we need in truth of all the sorts in his treasury.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 7

# Not slow

There's nae kennin' what God can do, nor yet what best o' rizzons he has for no doin' 't sooner! Whan we think he's lattin' the time gang, an' doin' naething, he may be jist doin' a' thing! No 'at I ever think like that noo; lat him do 'at he likes, what he does I'm sure o'. I'm o' his min' whether I ken his min' or no.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 27

# Rivers not reservoirs

These are they who gather grace, as the mountain-tops the snow, to send down rivers of water to their fellows.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 27

# Caelum non animum mutant

The man who is not content where he is, would never have been content somewhere else, though he might have complained less.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 31

# Waiting (II)

Donal prayed to God for lady Arctura, and waited. Her hour was not yet come, but was coming! Everyone that is ready the Father brings to Jesus: the disciple is not greater than his master, and must not think to hasten the hour, or lead one who is not yet taught of God; he must not be miserable about another as if God had forgotten him. Strange helpers of God we shall be, if, thinking to do his work, we act as if he were neglecting it! To wait for God, believing it his one design to redeem his creatures, ready to put the hand to, the moment his hour strikes, is the faith fit for a fellow-worker with him!

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 38

# Ambition (I)

"Will you tell me what you mean by saying you have no ambition?" "Where your work is laid out for you, there is no room for ambition: you have got your work to do!"

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 42

# Disillusionment

Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes. But men who, having seen, become blind again, think they have had their eyes finally opened.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 45

# Darkness invisible

She knows nothing really, and a great many things unreally. Unreal knowledge is worse than ignorance.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 57

# Experimental philosophy

"To come to the point in hand: the sole way for a man to know he has freedom is to do something he ought to do, which he would rather not do. He may strive to acquaint himself with the facts concerning will, and spend himself imagining its mode of working, yet all the time not know whether he has any will." "But how am I to put a force in operation, while I do not know whether I possess it or not?" "By putting it in operation – that alone; by being alive; by doing the next thing you ought to do, or abstaining from the next thing you are tempted to, knowing you ought not to do it. It sounds childish; and most people set action aside as what will do any time, and try first to settle questions which never can be settled but in just this divinely childish way. For not merely is it the only way in which a man can know whether he has a free will, but the man has in fact no will at all unless it comes into being in such action."

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 59

# A fool sees not the same tree

"You are splitting a hair!" "If the only way to life lay through a hair, what must you do but split it? The fact, however, is, that he who takes the live sphere of truth for a flat intellectual disc, may well take the disc's edge for a hair."

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 59

# What the Bible says

"What is bad ought to be got rid of at once." "Ah, but, don't you know? that might cost you your life!" "What of that, my lord! Life, the life you mean, is not the first thing." "Not the first thing! Why, the Bible says, 'All that a man hath will he give for his life'!" "That is in the Bible; but whether the Bible says it, is another thing." "I do not understand silly distinctions." "Why, my lord, who said that?" "What does it matter who said it?" "Much always; everything sometimes." "Who said it then?" "The devil."

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 59

# Weakness

Is it necessary to say she was not a weak woman? It is not betrayal of feeling, but avoidance of duty, that constitutes weakness.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 71

# Irrelevant foreknowledge (I)

At moments he felt as if he must return at once, and refuse to leave the castle for any reason. But he could not see that it was the will of God he should do so. A presentiment is not a command....A presentiment may be true, may be from God himself, yet involve no reason why a man should change his way, should turn a step aside from the path before him. St. Paul received warning after warning on his road to Jerusalem that bonds and imprisonment awaited him, and these warnings he knew came from the spirit of prophecy, but he heeded them only to set his face like a flint. He knew better than imagine duty determined by consequences, or take foresight for direction. There is a higher guide, and he followed that. So did Donal now. Moved to go back, he did not go back – neither afterwards repented that he did not.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 71

# Haste

But the mare was now getting tired, and no wonder, for she had had more than a hard day's work. Donal dismounted every now and then to relieve her, that he might go the faster when he mounted again, comforting himself that in the true path the delays are as important as the speed; for the hour is the point, not the swiftness: an hour too soon may even be more disastrous than an hour too late! He would arrive at the right time for him whose ways are not as our ways inasmuch as they are greatly better! The sun went down and the stars came out, and the long twilight began.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 72

# One way or another

"I'll have no spying into my heart! It acts just like other people's!" The doctor put his instrument aside, and laid his finger on the pulse instead: his business was to help, not to conquer, he said to himself: if he might not do what he would, he would do what he could.

_Donal Grant_ , ch. 78

# Not that (I)

What we call degeneracy is often but the unveiling of what was there all the time; and the evil we could become, we are.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 6

# When to answer

When things to say did not come to him, he went nowhere to fetch them. Almost in childhood he had learned that, when one is required to meet the lie, words are given him; when they are not, silence is better.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 11

# In my Father's house

He knew his Father in the same way that Jesus Christ knows His Father. He was at home in the universe, neither lonely, nor out-of-doors, nor afraid.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 11

# Not that (II)

George worshiped money; Alexa worshiped birth and land. Our own way of being wrong is all right in our own eyes; our neighbor's way of being wrong is offensive to all that is good in us. We are anxious therefore, kindly anxious, to pull the mote out of his eye, never thinking of the big beam in the way of the operation. Jesus labored to show us that our immediate business is to be right ourselves. Until we are, even our righteous indignation is waste.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 12

# A so-called duty

That she had to take care of herself was a falsehood that never entered her brain. To do what she ought, and not do what she ought not, was enough on her part, and God would do the rest!

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 13

# Shalom

They met as calmly as two prophets in the secret of the universe, neither anxious nor eager.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 13

# How to be radiant

Who obeys, shines.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 13

# Defilement

Then he touched the pitch, and thinking all the time it was but with one finger, was presently besmeared all over – as was natural, for he who will touch is already smeared.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 14

# Practical decisions

"Well, then, what am I to do?" persisted Dawtie. "Wait, of course, till you know what to do. When you don't know what to do, don't do anything – only keep asking the Thinker for wisdom."

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 16

# No peace

The worst rancor in the vessel of peace is the consciousness of wrong in a not all-unrighteous soul.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 18

# Did I make it worse?

On her part Dawtie never felt that she had anything more to say to him. She feared at times that she had done him evil rather than good by pressing upon him a duty she had not persuaded him to perform. She spoke of this fear to Andrew, but he answered decisively: "If you believed you ought to speak to him, and have discovered in yourself no wrong motive, you must not trouble yourself about the result. That may be a thousand years off yet. You may have sent him into a hotter purgatory, and at the same time made it shorter for him. We know nothing but that God is righteous."

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 18

# Work (I)

Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for ennui, and they are seldom to be pitied. Where people have not yet found their work, they may be more to be pitied than those that beg their bread. When a man knows his work and will not do it, pity him more than one who is to be hanged to-morrow.

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 18

# How to achieve simplicity

The man who cares only for what is true and right is saved much thinking and planning. He generally sees but one way of doing a thing!

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 24

# God's way (II)

"Weel, An'rew, gien the Lord hasna appeart in His ain likeness to deliver me, He's done the next best thing." "Dawtie," answered Andrew, "the Lord never does the next best. The thing He does is always better than the thing He does not."

_The Elect Lady_ , ch. 34

# More (I)

Within a few such days of hidden happiness,...came upon him...a deeper sense of the being and the presence of God, and a stronger desire to do the will of the Father, which is surely the best thing God himself can kindle in the heart of any man. For what good is there in creation but the possibility of being yet further created? And what else is growth but more of the will of God?

"Far above Rubies"

# Not waiting (II)

The logical discussion of a thing that has to be done, a thing awaiting action and not decision – the experiment, that is, whether the duty or the temptation has the more to say for itself, is one of the straight roads to the pit. Similarly, there are multitudes who lose their lives pondering what they ought to believe, while something lies at their door waiting to be done, and rendering it impossible for him who makes it wait, ever to know what to believe. Only a pure heart can understand, and a pure heart is one that sends out ready hands.

_The Flight of the Shadow_ , ch. 5

# Not the worst thing

Be good, my darling, be good, even if you die of sorrow because of it.

_The Flight of the Shadow_ , ch. 17

# The grand scheme

"But what do you think the woman will do next?" "I don't think. It is no use. We shall hear of her before long. If all mothers were like her, the world would hardly be saved!" "It would not be worth saving, uncle." "Whatever can be saved, must be worth saving, my child."

_The Flight of the Shadow_ , ch. 23

# Contingency planning

Where is the good of planning upon an _if_? To trust is to get ready, uncle says. Trust is better than foresight.

_The Flight of the Shadow_ , ch. 23

# More (II)

I began to delight in the feeling that I was in partnership with the powers of life; that I had to do with the operation and government and preservation of things created; that I was doing a work to which I was set by the Highest; that I was at least a floor-sweeper in the house of God, a servant for the good of his world.

_The Flight of the Shadow_ , ch. 30

# Looking your age

"How old are you, please?" returned Tangle. "Thousands of years old," answered the lady. "You don't look like it," said Tangle. "Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am!"

"The Golden Key"

# Not finished

No story...ends in this world. The first volume may have been very dull, and yet the next be full of delight.

_Heather and Snow_ , ch. 20

# Reasonable cares

All lovely sights tend to keep the soul pure, to lift the heart up to God, and above, not merely what people call low cares, but what people would call reasonable cares, although our great Teacher teaches us that such cares are unjust towards our Father in Heaven.

_Gutta Percha Willie_ , ch. 17

# Skimming

He imagined himself growing more and more capable of getting at the heart of a book by skimming its pages. If to skim be ever a true faculty, it must come of long experience in the art of reading, and is not possible to a beginner. To skim and judge, is to wake from a doze and give the charge to a jury.

_Home Again_ , ch. 8

# Work (II)

No man is a fool, who, having work to do, sets himself to do it.

_Home Again_ , ch. 17

# Men and women (I)

A man's well-being does not depend on any woman. The woman did not create, and could not have contented him. No woman can ruin a man by refusing him, or even by accepting him, though she may go far toward it.

_Home Again_ , ch. 22

# Obedience (I)

Walter sent the letter – posted it the next morning as he went to the office. It is many years since, and he has not heard of it yet. But there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed.

_Home Again_ , ch. 26

# Strength (I)

Self-will is weakness; the will to do right is strength; Molly willed the right thing and held to it. Hence it was that she was so gentle. She walked lightly over the carpet, because she could run up a hill like a hare. When she caught selfishness in her, she was down upon it with the knee and grasp of a giant. Strong is man and woman whose eternal life subjects the individual liking to the perfect will. Such man, such woman, is free man, free woman.

_Home Again_ , ch. 29

# Obedience (II)

Molly had made the one rational, one practical discovery, that life is to be lived, not by helpless assent or aimless drifting, but by active co-operation with the Life that has said "Live." To her everything was part of a whole, which, with its parts, she was learning to know, was finding out, by obedience to what she already knew. There is nothing for developing even the common intellect like obedience, that is, duty done. Those who obey are soon wiser than all their lessons; while from those who do not, will be taken away even what knowledge they started with.

_Home Again_ , ch. 30

# Obedience (III)

Until a man begins to obey, the light that is in him is darkness.

_The Hope of the Gospel_ , ch. 1

# Mirrors (II)

We must not however confound peculiarity with diversity. Diversity is in and from God; peculiarity in and from man. The real man is the divine idea of him; the man God had in view when he began to send him forth out of thought into thinking; the man he is now working to perfect by casting out what is not he, and developing what is he. But in God's real men, that is, his ideal men, the diversity is infinite; he does not repeat his creations; every one of his children differs from every other, and in every one the diversity is lovable. God gives in his children an analysis of himself, an analysis that will never be exhausted.

_The Hope of the Gospel_ , ch. 6

# Talents

A candle is not lighted for itself; neither is a man.

_The Hope of the Gospel_ , ch. 10

# Death (I)

We should never talk as if death were the end of anything.

_The Hope of the Gospel_ , ch. 10

# Our bodies

St. Paul never thinks of himself as released from body; he desires a perfect one, and of a nobler sort.

_The Hope of the Gospel_ , ch. 12

# Knowledge (I)

The tree of knowledge will never prove to man the tree of life.

_The Hope of the Gospel_ , ch. 1

# Ambition (II)

The quiet sweetness of his smile, and a composed look of submission were suggestive of the purification of sorrow, but were attributed by the townsfolk to disappointment; for he was still but a schoolmaster, whose aim they thought must be a pulpit and a parish. But Mr. Graham had been early released from such an ambition, if it had ever possessed him, and had for many years been more than content to give himself to the hopefuller work of training children for the true ends of life.

_Malcolm_ , ch. 7

# Work (III)

The sense of infinitude which comes to the soul when it is in harmony with the peace of nature, arose and spread itself abroad in Malcolm's being, and he felt with the Galilaeans of old, when they forsook their nets and followed him who called them, that catching fish was not the end of his being, although it was the work his hands had found to do.

_Malcolm_ , ch. 28

# Satisfying answers

"Does that satisfee yersel', Maister Graham?" asked Malcolm, looking deep into the eyes of his teacher. "Not at all," answered the master. "Does onything?" "Yes: but I will not say more on the subject now. The time may come when I shall have to speak that which I have learned, but it is not yet. All I will say now is, that I am at peace concerning the question. Indeed, so utterly do I feel myself the offspring of the One, that it would be enough for my peace now – I don't say it would have been always – to know my mind troubled on a matter: what troubled me would trouble God: my trouble at the seeming wrong must have its being in the right existent in him. In him, supposing I could find none I should yet say there must lie a lucent, harmonious, eternal, not merely consoling, but absolutely satisfying solution."

_Malcolm_ , ch. 47

# Work (IV)

At its heart, no winter, outside or in, can be unendurable. But Malcolm sorely missed the ministrations of compulsion: he lacked labour – the most helpful and most healing of all God's holy things, of which we so often lose the heavenly benefit by labouring inordinately that we may rise above the earthly need of it. How many sighs are wasted over the toil of the sickly – a toil which perhaps lifts off half the weight of their sickness, elevates their inner life, and makes the outer pass with tenfold rapidity.

_Malcolm_ , ch. 49

# Hurry

Who knows what harm may be done to a man by hurrying a spiritual process in him?

_Malcolm_ , ch. 53

# Suffering

While the cup of blessing may and often does run over, I doubt if the cup of suffering is ever more than filled to the brim.

_Malcolm_ , ch. 54

# Polluters

May the ghosts of the men who mar the earth, turning her sweet rivers into channels of filth, and her living air into irrespirable vapours and pestilences, haunt the desolations they have made, until they loathe the work of their hands, and turn from themselves with a divine repudiation.

_Malcolm_ , ch. 54

# Doorkeepers

He was not merely of the salt of the earth, but of the leaven of the kingdom, contributing more to the true life of the world than many a thousand far more widely known and honoured. Such as this man are the chief springs of thought, feeling, inquiry, action, in their neighbourhood; they radiate help and breathe comfort; they reprove, they counsel, they sympathize; in a word, they are doorkeepers of the house of God. Constantly upon its threshold, and every moment pushing the door to peep in, they let out radiance enough to keep the hearts of men believing in the light. They make an atmosphere about them in which spiritual things can thrive, and out of their school often come men who do greater things, better they cannot do, than they.

_Malcolm_ , ch. 60

# When a child dies

"I hae maist nae faith left. Ma'colm, man!" and with a bitter cry he started to his feet – "I maist dinna believe there's a God ava'. It disna luik like it – dis 't noo?" There came an answering cry from the closet; Annie rushed out, half undressed, and threw her arms about her husband. "Joseph! Joseph!" she said, in a voice hard with agony – almost more dreadful than a scream – "gien ye speyk like that, ye 'll drive me mad. Lat the lassie gang, but lea' me my God!" Joseph pushed her gently away; turned from her, fell on his knees, and moaned out – "O God, gien thoo has her, we s' neither greit nor grum'le: but dinna tak the faith frae's."

_Malcolm_ , ch. 61

# What thou must do

"Well, you know something of my history: what would you have me do now? At once, I mean. What would the person you speak of have me do?" "That is not for me to say, my lord." "You could give me a hint." "No. God is telling you himself. For me to presume to tell you, would be to interfere with him. What he would have a man do, he lets him know in his mind."

_Malcolm_ , ch. 69

# The use of plays and movies

The playhoose is whaur ye gang to see what comes o' things 'at ye canna follow oot in ordinar' life.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 17

# Preaching (I)

First of all he had learned to be silent while he had nought to reveal. He had been trained to babble about religion, but through God's grace had failed in his babble, and that was in itself a success. He would have made one of the swarm...but a burning coal from off the altar had been laid on his lips, and had silenced them in torture. For thirty years he had held his peace, until the word of God had become as a fire in his bones: it was now breaking forth in flashes.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 34

# The readiness is all

But he must be patient and follow as he was led. At three and twenty, he reflected, Milton was content to seem to himself but a poor creature, and was careful only to be ready for whatever work should hereafter be required of him: such contentment, with such hope and resolve at the back of it, he saw to be the right and the duty both of every man. He whose ambition is to be ready when he is wanted, whatever the work may be, may wait not the less watchful that he is content. His heart grew lighter, his head clearer, and by the time the two ladies with their attendant appeared, he felt such a masterdom over [the horse] Kelpie as he had never felt before.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 38

# Amo ut intelligam (II)

Her report of his words was anything but accurate, for as no one can be just without love, so no one can truly report without understanding.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 39

# Second childhood (II)

Our history moves in cycles, it is true, ever returning toward the point whence it started; but it is in the imperfect circles of a spiral it moves; it returns – but ever to a point above the former: even the second childhood, at which the fool jeers, is the better, the truer, the fuller childhood, growing strong to cast off altogether, with the husk of its own enveloping age, that of its family, its country, its world as well. Age is not all decay: it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 40

# Justice and mercy

"Where would be the wrong to others?" said Florimel, now back to her former position. "Why could it matter to tenants or society which of the brothers happened to be an earl?" "Only this, that, in the one case, the landlord of his tenants, the earl in society, would be an honourable man, in the other, a villain – a difference which might have consequences." "But," said Lady Clementina, "is not generosity something more than duty – something higher, something beyond it?" "Yes," answered Malcolm, "so long as it does not go against duty, but keeps in the same direction, is in harmony with it. I doubt much, though, whether, as we grow in what is good, we shall not come soon to see that generosity is but our duty, and nothing very grand and beyond it. But the man who chooses to be generous at the expense of justice, even if he give up at the same time everything of his own, is but a poor creature beside him who, for the sake of the right, will not only consent to appear selfish in the eyes of men, but will go against his own heart and the comfort of those dearest to him. The man who accepts a crown may be more noble than he who lays one down and retires to the desert. Of the worthies who do things by faith, some are sawn asunder, and some subdue kingdoms. The look of the thing is nothing."

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 42

# Seeing and saying

Clementina opened her eyes wide, but said nothing.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 42

# Strength (II)

The light of Malcolm's candle was beginning to penetrate into her dusky room, the power of his faith to tell upon the weakness of her unbelief. There is no strength in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 42

# Death (II)

"Mr. Tyrrel, then, the author's hero, joins the Moravians at last." "What are they?" questioned Clementina. "Simple, good, practical Christians, I believe," answered Malcolm. "But he only does it when disappointed in love." "No, my lady; he is not disappointed. The lady is only dead."

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 42

# Contempt

"Then how can you, professing to believe as you do, cherish such feelings towards any man as you have just been confessing?" "I don't cherish them, my lady. But I succeed in avoiding hate better than suppressing contempt, which perhaps is the worse of the two. There may be some respect in hate."

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 44

# Obedience (IV)

Understanding is the reward of obedience.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 53

# God's will (I)

After what he wants to give me I am wishing all day long. I used to build many castles, not without a beauty of their own – that was when I had less understanding: now I leave them to God to build for me – he does it better and they last longer.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 60

# Extra

Whoever can think of religion as an addition to life, however glorious – a starry crown, say, set upon the head of humanity, is not yet the least in the kingdom of heaven....The man to whom virtue is but the ornament of character, something over and above, not essential to it, is not yet a man.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 61

# Men and women (II)

If I say then, that Malcolm was always thinking about Lady Clementina when he was not thinking about something he had to think about, have I not said nearly enough on the matter? Should I ever dream of attempting to set forth what love is, in such a man for such a woman? There are comparatively few that have more than the glimmer of a notion of what love means. God only knows how grandly, how passionately yet how calmly, how divinely the man and the woman he has made, might, may, shall love each other. One thing only I will dare to say: that the love that belonged to Malcolm's nature was one through the very nerves of which the love of God must rise and flow and return, as its essential life. If any man think that such a love could no longer be the love of the man for the woman, he knows his own nature, and that of the woman he pretends or thinks he adores, but in the darkest of glasses.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 61

# Obedience (V)

Our Lord speaks of many coming up to his door confident of admission, whom yet he sends from him. Faith is obedience, not confidence.

_The Marquis of Lossie_ , ch. 64

# Knowledge (II)

"It is a beautiful poem," he said at last, quite honestly; and, raising his eyes, he looked straight in hers. There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 8

# Men and women (III)

At first sight, and if we do not look a long way ahead of what people stupidly regard as the end when it is only an horizon, it seems hard that so much we call evil, and so much that is evil, should result from that unavoidable, blameless, foreordained, preconstituted, and essential attraction which is the law of nature, that is the will of God, between man and woman.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 9

# Anger

There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 10

# Never the same

We may have better, but we can not have the same. God only can have the same. God grant our new may inwrap our old!

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 10

# Obedience (VI)

A Christian is just one that does what the Lord Jesus tells him. Neither more nor less than that makes a Christian. It is not even understanding the Lord Jesus that makes one a Christian. That makes one dear to the Father; but it is being a Christian, that is, doing what he tells us, that makes us understand him. Peter says the Holy Spirit is given to them that obey him: what else is that but just actually, really, doing what he says – just as if I was to tell you to go and fetch me my Bible, and you would get up and go? I want you to be just like that to the Lord Christ...

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 11

# God's will (II)

I want you to look out for his will, and find it, and do it. I want you not only to do it, though that is the main thing, when you think of it, but to look for it, that you may do it.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 11

# Fellow servants

Full of offense those generally are who talk most! Our strength ought to go into conduct, not into talk – least of all, into talk about what they call the doctrines of the gospel. The man who does what God tells him, sits at his Father's feet, and looks up in his Father's face; and men had better leave him alone, for he can not greatly mistake his Father, and certainly will not displease him.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 11

# Death (III)

[Though he was separated from her,] not the less remained the good he had given her. No good is ever lost. The heavenly porter was departed, but had left the door wide.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 19

# Mistakes

Even if she had put herself there, and was to blame for being there, that did not free her from the obligations of the position, and she was willing to do whatever should now be given her to do. God was not a hard master; if she had made a mistake, he would pardon her, and either give her work here, where she found herself, or send her elsewhere.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 26

# Knowledge (III)

But it is love that saves, and not opinion that damns; and let the Master himself deal with the weeds in his garden as with the tares in his field.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 42

# Self-interest

He thought no man his equal in penetrating the arena of motive, and reading actions in the light of motive; and, that the fundamental principle of all motive was self-interest, he assumed to be beyond dispute. With this candle, not that of the Lord, he searched the dark places of the soul; but, where the soul was light, his candle could show him nothing – served only to blind him yet further, if possible, to what was there present.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 43

# Decision-making

For ten days or so, she could form no idea of what she was likely or would like to do next. But, when we are in such perplexity, may not the fact be accepted as showing that decision is not required of us – perhaps just because our way is at the moment being made straight for us?

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 48

# Sickness (I)

Oh, what a dry, hard, cold world this would grow to, but for the blessing of its many sicknesses!

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 49

# Not my type

Neither in person was she at all his ideal. A woman like Hesper, uplifted and strong, broad-fronted and fearless, large-limbed, and full of latent life, was more of the ideal he could have written poetry about. But we are deeper than we know. Who is capable of knowing his own ideal? The ideal of a man's self is hid in the bosom of God, and may lie ages away from his knowledge; and his ideal of woman is the ideal belonging to this unknown self: the ideal only can bring forth an ideal. He can not, therefore, know his own ideal of woman; it is, nevertheless – so I presume – this his own unknown ideal that makes a man choose against his choice.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 49

# Men and women (IV)

Love and marriage are of the Father's most powerful means for the making of his foolish little ones into sons and daughters. But so unlike in many cases are the immediate consequences to those desired and expected, that it is hard for not a few to believe that he is anywhere looking after their fate – caring about them at all. And the doubt would be a reasonable one, if the end of things was marriage. But the end is life – that we become the children of God...

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 49

# Love's counterfeit

Godfrey felt as if suddenly damned; and his hell was death. He stood gazing on the white face. The world, heaven, God, and nature were dead, and that was the soul of it all, dead before him! But such death is never born of love. This agony was but the fog of disappointed self-love.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 49

# A cure worse than the disease

His pride was strong as ever, and both helped him to get over his suffering, and prevented him from gaining the good of it.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 49

# A sign of progress

Letty could not help being pleased to find that her aunt's storm no longer swamped her boat.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 49

# How to spoil a kindness

Hard words take all the sweetness from shelter.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 49

# Memories

There she lighted a candle, sat down on a pile of goods, and gave herself up to memories of the past. Back and back went her thoughts as far as she could send them. God was everywhere in all the story; and the clearer she saw him there the surer she was that she would find him as she went on.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 50

# Has it come to that?

It was so unlike her to be thus seriously discomposed, that Letty began to be frightened. She sat silent and looked at her. Then spoke the spirit of truth in the scholar, for the teacher was too troubled to hear. She rose, and going up to Mary from behind, put her arm round her, and whispered in her ear: "Mary, why don't you ask Jesus?"

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 50

# God's will (III)

I have found out why I did not go at once to ask Him what I ought to do. It was just because I was afraid of what he would tell me to do.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 50

# Obedience (VII)

The whole secret is to do the thing the Master tells you: then you will understand what he tells you. The opinion of the wisest man, if he does not do the things he reads, is not worth a rush. He may be partly right, but you have no reason to trust him.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 52

# First things first

Mary did not waste words: where would have been the use of pulling up the poor spiritual clodpole at every lumbering step, at any word inconsistent with the holy manners of the high countries? Once get him to court, and the power of the presence would subdue him, and make him over again from the beginning, without which absolute renewal the best observance of religious etiquette is worse than worthless. Many good people are such sticklers for the proprieties!

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 52

# Money

"I have plenty of money, and don't care about more. I would much rather not have any from you." "But think how much good you might do with it!" said Mr. Redmain, satirically. "It was come by honestly – so far as I know." "Money can't do half the good people think. It is stubborn stuff to turn to any good. And in this case it would be directly against good." "Nobody has a right to refuse what comes honestly in his way. There's no end to the good that may be done with money – to judge, at least, by the harm I've done with mine," said Mr. Redmain, this time with seriousness. "It is not in it," persisted Mary. "If it had been, our Lord would have used it, and he never did."

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 52

# Not that (III)

Different kinds of evil affect people differently. Ten thousand will do a dishonest thing, who would indignantly reject the dishonest thing favored by another ten thousand. They are not sufficiently used to its ugly face not to dislike it, though it may not be quite so ugly as their protegé. A man will feel grandly honest against the dishonesties of another trade than his, and be eager to justify those of his own.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 54

# Competition

For my part, I don't feel that strife of any sort is necessary to make me enjoy life; of all things it is what makes me miserable. I grant you that effort and struggle add immeasurably to the enjoyment of life, but those I look upon as labor, not strife. There may be whole worlds for us to help bring into order and obedience.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 57

# Death (IV)

I came from God, and I'm going back to God, and I won't have any gaps of death in the middle of my life.

_Mary Marston_ , ch. 57

# Not waiting (III)

She was rather melancholy, but hoped as much as she could, and when she could not hope did not stand still, but walked on in the dark. I think when the sun rises upon them, some people will be astonished to find how far they have got in the dark.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 9

# Books and people

Do I dislike Mrs. Bevis? Not in the smallest degree. I could read a book I loved in her presence. That would be impossible to me in the presence of Mrs. Ramshorn.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 13

# Misreading (II)

He read his philosophy by the troubled light of wrong and suffering, and that is not the light of the morning, but of a burning house.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 15

# Mere coincidence (I)

Would the fact that the provision was made so early turn the result into a mere chance meeting of necessity and subsidy? Am I bound to call every good thing I receive a chance, except an angel come down visibly out of the blue sky and give it to me? That would be to believe in a God who could not work His will by His own laws.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 15

# Science and theology

"I am surprised to hear you say so," returned Faber. "The conclusions necessary thereupon, are opposed to all your theology." "Must I then, because I believe in a living Truth, be myself an unjust judge?" said the curate. "But indeed the conclusions are opposed to no theology I have any acquaintance with; and if they were, it would give me no concern. Theology is not my origin, but God. Nor do I acknowledge any theology but what Christ has taught, and has to teach me. When, and under what circumstances, life comes first into human ken, can not affect His lessons of trust and fairness. If I were to play tricks with the truth, shirk an argument, refuse to look a fact in the face, I should be ashamed to look Him in the face. What he requires of his friends is pure, open-eyed truth."

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 20

# Even worse

It was not my poverty – it was not being sure of God that crushed me.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 25

# Work (V)

The more a man occupies himself in doing the works of the Father – the sort of thing the Father does, the easier will he find it to believe that such a Father is at work in the world.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 28

# Men and women (V)

Had she begun to cease loving? No. She loved better than she knew, but she must love infinitely better yet.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 30

# Men and women (VI)

Juliet was proud of her Paul, and loved him as much as she was yet capable of loving. But she had thought they were enough for each other, and already, although she was far from acknowledging it to herself, she had, in the twilight of her thinking, begun to doubt it. Nor can she be blamed for the doubt. Never man and woman yet succeeded in being all in all to each other.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 30

# Mere coincidence (II)

If people were both observant and memorious, they would cease, I fancy, to be astonished at coincidences. Rightly regarded, the universe is but one coincidence – only where will has to be developed, there is need for human play, and room for that must be provided in its spaces. The works of God being from the beginning, and all his beginnings invisible either from greatness or smallness or nearness or remoteness, numberless coincidences may pass in every man's history, before he becomes capable of knowing either the need or the good of them, or even of noting them.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 35

# Strength (III)

Nothing makes a man strong like a call upon him for help.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 36

# Sickness (II)

It is true that it is often, perhaps it is generally, in troubled health, that such thoughts come first; but in nature there are facts of color that the cloudy day reveals. So sure am I that many things which illness has led me to see are true, that I would endlessly rather never be well than lose sight of them.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 36

# Why?

"Why does He do it? He could have avoided all this trouble by leaving us alone." "I put something like the same question once to Mr. Wingfold," said Dorothy, "and he told me it was impossible to show any one the truths of the kingdom of Heaven; he must learn them for himself. 'I can do little more,' he said, 'than give you my testimony that it seems to me all right. If God has not made you good, He has made you with the feeling that you ought to be good, and at least a half-conviction that to Him you have to go for help to become good. When you are good, then you will know why He did not make you good at first, and will be perfectly satisfied with the reason, because you will find it good and just and right – so good that it was altogether beyond the understanding of one who was not good. I don't think,' he said, 'you will ever get a thoroughly satisfactory answer to any question till you go to Himself for it – and then it may take years to make you fit to receive, that is to understand the answer.'"

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 36

# Seeds of thought

"But what if God should be the only where to find your Paul?" said Dorothy. "What if the gulf that parts you is just the gulf of a God not believed in – a universe which neither of you can cross to meet the other – just because you do not believe it is there at all?" Juliet made no answer – Dorothy could not tell whether from feeling or from indifference. The fact was, the words conveyed no more meaning to Juliet than they will to some of my readers. Why do I write them then? Because there are some who will understand them at once, and others who will grow to understand them.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 36

# Tomorrow's care (I)

But she remembered how the Lord had said she was to take no thought for the morrow; and therewith she began to understand the word. She saw that one can not do any thing in to-morrow, and that all care which can not be put into the work of to-day, is taken out of it.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 36

# Doubt (II)

Peace is for those who _do_ the truth, not those who opine it. The true man troubled by intellectual doubt, is so troubled unto further health and growth. Let him be alive and hopeful, above all obedient, and he will be able to wait for the deeper content which must follow with completer insight.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 37

# The uses of adversity (I)

One thing is clear, that poor Juliet, like most women, and more men, would never have begun to learn any thing worth learning, if she had not been brought into genuine, downright trouble. Indeed I am not sure but some of those who seem so good as to require no trouble, are just those who have already been most severely tried.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 38

# Meddling (I)

But in as much as he was ready to help, he recoiled from meddling. To meddle is to destroy the holy chance. Meddlesomeness is the very opposite of helpfulness, for it consists in forcing your self into another self, instead of opening your self as a refuge to the other....He knew that, as the Father unresting works for the weal of men, so every son, following the Master-Son, must work also. Through weakness and suffering he had learned it. But he never doubted that his work as much as his bread would be given him, never rushed out wildly snatching at something to do for God, never helped a lazy man to break stones...

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 39

# Men and women (VII)

Sometimes two persons are like two drops running alongside of each other down a window-pane: one marvels how it is they can so long escape running together.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 39

# Felix culpa (I)

Indeed, but for the fault she had committed, she would all her life long have been given to petting and pitying, justifying and approving of herself. One can not help sometimes feeling that the only chance for certain persons is to commit some fault sufficient to shame them out of the self-satisfaction in which they burrow.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 40

# Grief that goes bad

Sorrow is not selfish, but many persons are in sorrow entirely selfish. It makes them so important in their own eyes, that they seem to have a claim upon all that people can do for them.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 40

# Sorrow that spoils

A selfish sorrow, a selfish love even, makes us stupid, and Juliet had been growing more and more stupid. Many people, it seems to me, through sorrow endured perforce and without a gracious submission, slowly sink in the scale of existence.

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ , ch. 43

# All things

Yet I know that good is coming to me – that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good.

_Phantastes_ , ch. 25

# What to worry about

"Dear grandmother," said Irene, "I'm not so sure that I haven't done something wrong. I ought to have run up to you at once when the long-legged cat came in at the window, instead of running out on the mountain and making myself such a fright." "You were taken by surprise, my child, and you are not so likely to do it again. It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again. Come."

_The Princess and the Goblin_ , ch. 15

# Not ready

"What does it all mean, grandmother?" she sobbed, and burst into fresh tears. "It means, my love, that I did not mean to show myself. Curdie is not yet able to believe some things. Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing. You remember I told you that if Lootie were to see me, she would rub her eyes, forget the half she saw, and call the other half nonsense.'

_The Princess and the Goblin_ , ch. 22

# Who is responsible? (I)

"There is just one thing more,' said Irene. "I am a little anxious about Curdie. As I brought him into the house, I ought to have seen him safe on his way home." "I took care of all that," answered the lady. "I told you to let him go, and therefore I was bound to look after him.

_The Princess and the Goblin_ , ch. 23

# Perspective

The weather was much the same; but its dreariness had vanished. There was a glowing spot in my heart which drove out the cold, and glorified the black frost that bound the earth.

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ , ch. 19

# Finding God's will

"But what is the right tune of a body's life, father?" "The will of God, my boy." "But how is a person to know that, father?" "By trying to do what he knows of it already. Everybody has a different kind of tune in his life, and no one can find out another's tune for him, though he may help him to find it for himself."

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ , ch. 26

# Bible reading

"But aren't we to read the Bible, father?" "Yes, if it's in order to obey it. To read the Bible thinking to please God by the mere reading of it, is to think like a heathen."

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ , ch. 26

# When to stop reading

"I've read it [ _Pilgrim's Progress_ ] a good many times, father. But I was a little tired of it before I got through it last time."..."Well, I think you'd better not open the book again for a long time – say twenty years at least. It's a great deal too good a book to let yourself get tired of. By that time I trust you will be able to understand it a great deal better than you can at present." I felt a little sorry that I was not to look at the Pilgrim's Progress for twenty years; but I am very glad of it now. "We must not spoil good books by reading them too much," my father added. "It is often better to think about them than to read them; and it is best never to do either when we are tired of them. We should get tired of the sunlight itself, beautiful as it is, if God did not send it away every night. We're not even fit to have moonlight always. The moon is buried in the darkness every month."

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ , ch. 26

# When to stop talking

My father was not the man to heap words upon words and so smother the thought that lay in them.

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ , ch. 26

# What a teacher can add

Sometimes Mr. Wilson would ask me to go home with him after school, and take supper. This made me late, but my father did not mind it, for he liked me to be with Mr. Wilson. I learned a good deal from him at such times. He had an excellent little library, and would take down his favourite books and read me passages. It is wonderful how things which, in reading for ourselves, we might pass over in a half-blind manner, gain their true power and influence through the voice of one who sees and feels what is in them. If a man in whom you have confidence merely lays his finger on a paragraph and says to you, "Read that," you will probably discover three times as much in it as you would if you had only chanced upon it in the course of your reading. In such case the mind gathers itself up, and is all eyes and ears.

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ , ch. 30

# Worn but not withered

If you turn your face to the Sun, my boy, your soul will, when you come to die, feel like an autumn, with the golden fruits of the earth hanging in rich clusters ready to be gathered – not like a winter. You may feel ever so worn, but you will not feel withered. You will die in peace, hoping for the spring – and such a spring!

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ , ch. 31

# Growing up (I)

"Ranald," he said, "we were to have been married next year." Before the grief of the man, mighty in its silence, my whole being was humbled. I knew my love was not so great as his. It grew in my eyes a pale and feeble thing; and I felt worthless in the presence of her dead, whom alive I had loved with peaceful gladness. Elsie belonged to Turkey, and he had lost her, and his heart was breaking. I threw my arms round him, and wept for him, not for myself. It was thus I ceased to be a boy.

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ , ch. 36

# A vital difference

Whatever God does must be right, but are we sure that we know what he does? That which men say he does may be very wrong indeed.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 1, ch. 12

# Not peace but a sword

The strife which results from believing that the higher love demands the suppression of the lower, is the most fearful of all discords, the absolute love slaying love – the house divided against itself; one moment all given up for the will of Him, the next the human tenderness rushing back in a flood.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 1, ch. 13

# Education

It is good that children of faculty, as distinguished from capacity, should not have too many books to read, or too much of early lessoning. The increase of examinations in our country will increase its capacity and diminish its faculty. We shall have more compilers and reducers and fewer thinkers; more modifiers and completers, and fewer inventors.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 1, ch. 18

# Was the summer a lie?

Was the summer a lie? Not so. The winter restrains, that the summer may have the needful time to do its work well; for the winter is but the sleep of summer.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 2, ch. 1

# At the time

Night after night he returned to the parlour cold to the very heart. God was not to be found, he said then. He said afterwards that even then "God was with him though he knew it not."

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 2, ch. 1

# Institutions (I)

I did think of endowing a hospital; but I'm not sure that it isn't better to endow a good man than a hospital.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 2, ch. 8

# What can be proven

Suppose there war a God, Mr. Ericson, do ye think ye bude (behoved) to be able to pruv that? Do ye think God cud stan' to be pruved as gin he war something sma' eneuch to be turned roon' and roon', and luikit at upo' ilka side? Gin there war a God, wadna it jist be sae – that we cudna prove him to be, I mean?

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 2, ch. 12

# When to stop knocking

It is not good that a man should batter day and night at the gate of heaven. Sometimes he can do nothing else, and then nothing else is worth doing; but the very noise of the siege will sometimes drown the still small voice that calls from the open postern.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 2, ch. 17

# Where was God?

At midnight he found himself on a solitary hill-top, seated in the heather, with a few tiny fir-trees about him, and the sounds of a wind, ethereal as the stars overhead, flowing through their branches: he heard the sound of it, but it did not touch him. Where was God? In him and his question.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 2, ch. 19

# Loving grandly

He could not love her otherwise than grandly. For her sake, weary with loving her, he would yet turn to his work, and, to be worthy of her, or rather, for he never dreamed of being worthy of her, to be worthy of leave to love her, would forget her enough to lay hold of some abstract truth of lines, angles, or symbols. A strange way of being in love, reader? You think so? I would there were more love like it: the world would be centuries nearer its redemption if a millionth part of the love in it were of the sort. All I insist, however, on my reader's believing is, that it showed, in a youth like Robert, not less but more love that he could go against love's sweetness for the sake of love's greatness. Literally, not figuratively, Robert would kiss the place where her foot had trod; but I know that once he rose from such a kiss "to trace the hyperbola by means of a string."

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 2, ch. 20

# Iron sharpeneth iron

Neither was a guide to the other; but the questioning of two may give just the needful points by which the parallax of a truth may be gained.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 2, ch. 20

# Fleeting but not false

I do not think this mood, wherein all forms of beauty sped to his soul as to their own needful centre, could have lasted over many miles of his journey. But such delicate inward revelations are none the less precious that they are evanescent.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 1

# The virtue of a good mood

Many feelings are simply too good to last – using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, expressing the conviction that God is a hard father, fond of disappointing his children, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot yet coexist in the human economy. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in the absence which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, work even more good than in its presence.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 1

# Preparation as obedience

As he thought and thought it became gradually plainer that he must begin his obedience by getting ready for anything that God might require of him. Therefore he must go on learning till the call came.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 1

# When someone is grieving

He had too much respect for sorrow to approach it with curiosity. He had learned to put off his shoes when he drew nigh the burning bush of human pain.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 2

# Haste (I)

And "he that believeth shall not make haste." Labour without perturbation, readiness without hurry, no haste, and no hesitation, was the divine law of his activity.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 6

# Meddling (II)

You mustn't interfere with God's thousand years any more than his one day.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 8

# Haste (II)

"Of one thing I am pretty sure," he resumed, "that the same recipe Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: 'Do the thing that lies next you.' That is all our business. Hurried results are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the divine patience. How long it took to make the cradle! and we fret that the baby Humanity is not reading Euclid and Plato, even that it is not understanding the Gospel of St. John! If there is one thing evident in the world's history, it is that God hasteneth not. All haste implies weakness. Time is as cheap as space and matter."

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 8

# Not that (IV)

No indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 8

# Why God seems invisible

"This is the kind of thing," I said, "that makes me doubt whether there be a God in heaven." "That is only because he is down here," answered Falconer, "taking such good care of us all that you can't see him. There is not a gin-palace, or yet lower hell in London, in which a man or woman can be out of God. The whole being love, there is nothing for you to set it against and judge it by. So you are driven to fancies."

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 8

# When souls hang in the balance

"He that believeth shall not make haste," he said. There is plenty of time. You must not imagine that the result depends on you, or that a single human soul can be lost because you may fail. The question, as far as you are concerned, is, whether you are to be honoured in having a hand in the work that God is doing, and will do, whether you help him or not. Some will be honoured: shall it be me? And this honour gained excludes no one: there is work, as there is bread in his house, enough and to spare. It shows no faith in God to make frantic efforts or frantic lamentations."

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 11

# What God wants

That is all very true; but you need a change. I have seen for some weeks that you are failing. Mind, it is our best work that He wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 16

# What God needs

He seems ambitious of killing himself with work – of wearing himself out in the service of his master – and as quickly as possible. A good deal of that kind of thing is a mere holding of the axe to the grindstone, not a lifting of it up against thick trees. Only he won't be convinced till it comes to the helve. I met him the other day; he was looking as white as his surplice. I took upon me to read him a lecture on the holiness of holidays. "I can't leave my poor," he said. "Do you think God can't do without you?" I asked. "Is he so weak that he cannot spare the help of a weary man? But I think he must prefer quality to quantity, and for healthy work you must be healthy yourself."

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 16

# To thine own self be true (I)

I recognize no duty as owing to a man's self. There is and can be no such thing. I am and can be under no obligation to myself. The whole thing is a fiction, and of evil invention. It comes from the upper circles of the hell of selfishness.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 17

# Ne plus ultra

When shall a man dare to say that God has done all he can?

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 18

# The longer it takes

But this was not the end; and Robert always believed that the end must be the greater in proportion to the distance it was removed, to give time for its true fulfilment.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 19

# The uses of adversity (II)

It will naturally occur to my reader that his goodness was not much yet. It was not. It may have been greater than we could be sure of, though. But if any one object that such a conversion, even if it were perfected, was poor, inasmuch as the man's free will was intromitted with, I answer: "The development of the free will was the one object. Hitherto it was not free." I ask the man who says so: "Where would your free will have been if at some period of your life you could have had everything you wanted?" If he says it is nobler in a man to do with less help, I answer, "Andrew was not noble: was he therefore to be forsaken? The prodigal was not left without the help of the swine and their husks, at once to keep him alive and disgust him with the life. Is the less help a man has from God the better?"

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 20

# Institutions (II)

It is better to endow one man, who will work as the Father works, than a hundred charities.

_Robert Falconer_ , vol. 3, ch. 20

# Growing up (II)

He was always too much of a man to want to look like a man by imitating men. That is unmanly. A boy who wants to look like a man is not a manly boy, and men do not care for his company. A true boy is always welcome to a true man, but a would-be man is better on the other side of the wall.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 5

# Knowledge (IV)

His theories of religion were neither large nor lofty; he accepted those that were handed down to him, and did not trouble himself as to whether they were correct. He did what was better: he tried constantly to obey the law of God, whether he found it in the Bible or in his own heart. Thus he was greater in the kingdom of heaven than thousands that knew more, had better theories about God, and could talk much more fluently concerning religion than he. By obeying God he let God teach him. So his heart was always growing; and where the heart grows, there is no fear of the intellect; there it also grows, and in the best fashion of growth. He was very good to his people, and not foolishly kind.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 6

# Growing up (III)

Give me a slow, steady boy, who knows when he does not know a thing! To know that you do not know, is to be a small prophet. Such a boy has a glimmer of the something he does not know, or at least of the place where it is; while the boy who easily grasps the words that stand for a thing, is apt to think he knows the thing itself when he sees but the wrapper of it – thinks he knows the church when he has caught sight of the weather-cock.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 6

# Like eagles

He would walk many miles, and come home less fatigued than his companion. To be sure, he had not much weight to carry; but it seemed to Mr. Porson that his utter freedom from thought about himself had a large share in his immunity from weariness.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 7

# Preaching (II)

The good man never wrote or read a sermon, but talked to his people as one who would meet what was in them with what was in him. Hence they always believed "the parson meant it." He never said anything clever, and never said anything unwise; never amused them, and never made them feel scornful, either of him or of any one else.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 7

# For their children

Clare saw that it was as foolish to hoard for another as for himself....She was not one of those mothers of little faith who trust God for themselves but not for their children.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 9

# The uses of adversity (III)

There are thousands for whom a blow is a better thing than expostulation, persuasion, or any sort of kindness. They are such that nothing but a blow will set their door ajar for love to get in. That is why hardships, troubles, disappointments, and all kinds of pain and suffering, are sent to so many of us. We are so full of ourselves, and feel so grand, that we should never come to know what poor creatures we are, never begin to do better, but for the knock-down blows that the loving God gives us. We do not like them, but he does not spare us for that.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 23

# Not yet

This might be the very work he had been looking for without knowing it! It was for this, perhaps, he had been kept so long waiting – till the caravans should come along the road, and he be at the corner as they passed! He did not know how often a man may think thus and see it come to nothing – because there is better yet behind, for which more waiting is wanted.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 41

# Fair wages

Few scruple to take advantage of the misfortune of another to get his service cheap. It is the economy of hell.

_A Rough Shaking_ , ch. 42

# God's answer

When God came to Job, Job forgot all he had intended to say to him – did not ask him a single question – knew that all was well.

_Salted with Fire_ , ch. 13

# Show us the Father

God is just like Jesus – exactly like him!

_Salted with Fire_ , ch. 17

# Why God permits evil (I)

Some people nothing but an earthquake will rouse from their dead sleep: I was one of such. God in His mercy brought on the earthquake: it woke me and saved me from death. Ignorant creatures go about asking why God permits evil: we know why! It may be He could with a word cause evil to cease – but would that be to create good?

_Salted with Fire_ , ch. 26

# When to think

"What do you want made plainer, my child?" I asked. "When we're to think, and when we're not to think," she answered..."If the known duty of to-morrow depends on the work of to-day," I answered, "if it cannot be done right except you think about it and lay your plans for it, then that thought is to-day's business, not to-morrow's."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 2

# He that hath ears to hear

"Well, papa, I sometimes wish you wouldn't explain things so much. I seem to understand you all the time you are preaching, but when I try the text afterwards by myself, I can't make anything of it, and I've forgotten every word you said about it." "Perhaps that is because you have no right to understand it." "I thought all Protestants had a right to understand every word of the Bible," she returned. "If they can," I rejoined. "But last Sunday, for instance, I did not expect anybody there to understand a certain bit of my sermon, except your mamma and Thomas Weir." "How funny! What part of it was that?" "O! I'm not going to tell you. You have no right to understand it. But most likely you thought you understood it perfectly, and it appeared to you, in consequence, very commonplace." "In consequence of what?" "In consequence of your thinking you understood it."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 2

# Future burdens (I)

What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything he gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what he may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next. And I do not believe that those who follow this rule are ever left floundering on the sea-deserted sands of inaction, unable to find water enough to swim in.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 2

# What to study

But I hold that whatever mental food you take should be just a little too strong for you. That implies trouble, necessitates growth, and involves delight.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 2

# Parents (I)

For one of the great goods that come of having two parents, is that the one balances and rectifies the motions of the other. No one is good but God. No one holds the truth, or can hold it, in one and the same thought, but God. Our human life is often, at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the truth.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 2

# Our real work

"But what have I got to do? I don't feel able for anything," she said; and again the tears came in her eyes, as if I had been telling her to get up and she could not. "A great deal of our work," I answered, "we do without knowing what it is."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 3

# My yoke is easy

And do you think that the work God gives us to do is never easy? Jesus says his yoke is easy, his burden is light. People sometimes refuse to do God's work just because it is easy. This is, sometimes, because they cannot believe that easy work is his work; but there may be a very bad pride in it: it may be because they think that there is little or no honour to be got in that way; and therefore they despise it. Some again accept it with half a heart, and do it with half a hand. But, however easy any work may be, it cannot be well done without taking thought about it.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 3

# Preparation

Do you know, I do believe that God wanted a grand poem from that man [John Milton], and therefore blinded him that he might be able to write it. But he had first trained him up to the point – given him thirty years in which he had not to provide the bread of a single day, only to learn and think; then set him to teach boys; then placed him at Cromwell's side, in the midst of the tumultuous movement of public affairs, into which the late student entered with all his heart and soul; and then last of all he cast the veil of a divine darkness over him, sent him into a chamber far more retired than that in which he laboured at Cambridge, and set him like the nightingale to sing darkling. The blackness about him was just the great canvas which God gave him to cover with forms of light and music. Deep wells of memory burst upwards from below...

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 3

# Old age and the senses

Verily, youth is good, but old age is better – to the man who forsakes not his youth when his youth forsakes him. The sweet visitings of nature do not depend upon youth or romance, but upon that quiet spirit whose meekness inherits the earth. The smell of that field of beans gives me more delight now than ever it could have given me when I was a youth. And if I ask myself why I find it is simply because I have more faith now than I had then. It came to me then as an accident of nature – a passing pleasure flung to me only as the dogs' share of the crumbs. Now I believe that God means that odour of the bean-field; that when Jesus smelled such a scent about Jerusalem or in Galilee, he thought of his Father. And if God means it, it is mine, even if I should never smell it again. The music of the spheres is mine if old age should make me deaf as the adder. Am I mystical again, reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with this same beautiful mystical life of ours.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 12

# Suffering

On her face lay a certain repose which attracted me. She looked as if she had suffered but had consented to it, and therefore could smile.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 14

# Drowning (I)

"Some of your sons were drowned, for all that you say about their safety." "Well, sir," she answered, with a sigh, "I trust they're none the less safe for that. It would be a strange thing for an old woman like me, well-nigh threescore and ten, to suppose that safety lay in not being drownded."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 15

# What is the bottom of the sea?

She believed in that which held the sea, and knew that, when it pleased God to part his confining fingers, there would be no more sea...."The church she seem to tell me all the time, that for all the roaring outside, there be really no danger after all. What matter if they go to the bottom? What is the bottom of the sea, sir? You bein' a clergyman can tell that, sir. I shouldn't ha' known it if I hadn't had boys o' my own at sea, sir. But you can tell, sir, though you ain't got none there." And though she was putting her parson to his catechism, the smile that returned on her face was as modest as if she had only been listening to his instruction. I had not long to look for my answer. "The hollow of his hand," I said, and said no more. "I thought you would know it, sir," she returned, with a little glow of triumph in her tone.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 15

# Getting older

I think the ascent of this hill was the first experience I had – a little to my humiliation, nothing to my sorrow – that I was descending another hill. I had to set down the precious burden rather oftener before we reached the brow of the cliffs than would have been necessary ten years before. But this was all right, and the newly-discovered weakness then was strength to the power which carries me about on my two legs now. It is all right still. I shall be stronger by and by.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 16

# Everything is personal

Could not his Father, if he too was down on the lake, help them without him? Yes. But he wanted him to do it, that they might see that he did it. Otherwise they would only have thought that the wind fell and the waves lay down, without supposing for a moment that their Master or his Father had had anything to do with it. They would have done just as people do now-a-days: they think that the help comes of itself, instead of by the will of him who determined from the first that men should be helped.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 17

# Under his watchful gaze

But supposing you, who know something about him, were alone on the sea, and expecting your boat to be swamped every moment – if you found out all at once, that he was looking down at you from some lofty hilltop, and seeing all round about you in time and space too, would you be afraid? He might mean you to go to the bottom, you know. Would you mind going to the bottom with him looking at you? I do not think I should mind it myself.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 17

# How he will come

Sees he not the little boat of your fortunes tossed with the waves and the contrary wind? Assuredly he will come to you walking on the waters. It may not be in the way you wish, but if not, you will say at last, "This is better."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 1, ch. 17

# The look of things

The truth of things is indeed the only refuge from the look of things.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 2, ch. 21

# Negative capability

He...talked well on the topics of the day, not altogether as a, man who had made up his mind, but not the less, rather the more, as a man who had thought about them, and one who did not find it so easy to come to a conclusion as most people do – or possibly as not feeling the necessity of coming to a conclusion, and therefore preferring to allow the conclusion to grow instead of constructing one for immediate use.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 2, ch. 22

# Parents (II)

"You are right, my dear," I said, "quite right. I have been wicked, for I have been denying my God. I have been putting my providence in the place of his – trying, like an anxious fool, to count the hairs on Wynnie's head, instead of being content that the grand loving Father should count them. My love, let us pray for Wynnie; for what is prayer but giving her to God and his holy, blessed will?"...Then we rose together, and walked homeward, still in silence. But my heart and hand clung to my wife as to the angel whom God had sent to deliver me out of the prison of my faithlessness...."You have been a moon to me this night, my wife," I said. "You were looking full at the truth, while I was dark. I saw its light in your face, and believed, and turned my soul to the sun."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 3, ch. 31

# Why God permits evil (II)

"I doubt if the world would fare better without its shadows." "But it would be a poor satisfaction, with regard to the nature of God, to be told that he allowed evil for artistic purposes." "It would indeed, if you regard the world as a picture. But if you think of his art as expended, not upon the making of a history or a drama, but upon the making of an individual, a being, a character, then I think a great part of the difficulty concerning the existence of evil which oppresses you will vanish...." "I think I understand you," returned Percivale. "I will think over what you have said. These are very difficult questions." "Very. I don't think argument is of much use about them, except as it may help to quiet a man's uneasiness a little, and so give his mind peace to think about duty. For about the doing of duty there can be no question, once it is seen. And the doing of duty is the shortest – in very fact, the only way into the light."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 3, ch. 32

# Future burdens (II)

"One thing I repeat – the waves that foamed across the spot where we now stand are gone away, have sunk and vanished." "But they will come again, papa," faltered Wynnie. "And God will come with them, my love," I said, as we lifted the litter.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 3, ch. 32

# A complaining temper

"I fear I have a discontented mind and a complaining temper. But I do try, and I will try hard to overcome it." "It will not get the better of you, so long as you do the duty of the moment."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 3, ch. 33

# Arguing (III)

But it would be of no use to try to get it out of his head by any argument. He has a kind of craze in that direction. To get people's hearts right is of much more importance than convincing their judgments. Right judgment will follow. All such fixed ideas should be encountered from the deepest grounds of truth, and not from the outsides of their relations.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 3, ch. 33

# But I'm made this way

"But how can I help it, papa?" she asked piteously. "I am made so." But as she spoke the dawn was clear upon the height of her forehead. "You are not made yet, as I am always telling you; and God has ordained that you shall have a hand in your own making. You have to consent, to desire that what you know for a fault shall be set right by his loving will and spirit."

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 3, ch. 38

# A sermon of Bible-reading

Nor did I add any word of comment, fearful of darkening counsel by words without knowledge. For the Bible is awfully set against what is not wise.

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 3, ch. 39

# Doubt (III)

For a doubter is not without faith. The very fact that he doubts, shows that he has some faith. When I find anyone hard upon doubters, I always doubt the quality of his faith. It is of little use to have a great cable, if the hemp is so poor that it breaks like the painter of a boat. I have known people 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!

_The Seaboard Parish_ , vol. 3, ch. 40

# Inert truth

What truth he held himself, he held as a sack holds corn – not even as a worm holds earth.

_Sir Gibbie_ , ch. 19

# Laughter

Most Scotch women, and more than most Scotch men, would have rebuked him for laughing, but Janet knew in herself a certain tension of delight which nothing served to relieve but a wild laughter of holiest gladness; and never in tears of deepest emotion did her heart appeal more directly to its God. It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God, that is afraid to laugh in his presence.

_Sir Gibbie_ , ch. 23

# How to enjoy the present

Gibbie never thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to any reader: How could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a phosphorescent gleam – the summer lightning of the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God's present thought out-bodying him. The shoots of glad consciousness that come to the obedient man, surpass in bliss whole days and years of such ravined rapture as he gains whose weariness is ever spurring the sides of his intent towards the ever retreating goal of his desires.

_Sir Gibbie_ , ch. 24

# When the next thing is unclear

When he sank foiled from any endeavour to understand how a man was to behave in certain circumstances, these or those, he always took refuge in doing something – and doing it better than before; leaped the more eagerly if Robert called him, spoke the more gently to Oscar, turned the sheep more careful not to scare them – as if by instinct he perceived that the only hope of understanding lies in doing. He would cleave to the skirt when the hand seemed withdrawn; he would run to do the thing he had learned yesterday, when as yet he could find no answer to the question of to-day.

_Sir Gibbie_ , ch. 25

# Mistakes

Doubtless Gibbie, as well as many a wiser man, might now and then make a mistake in the embodiment of his obedience, but even where the action misses the command, it may yet be obedience to him who gave the command, and by obeying one learns how to obey.

_Sir Gibbie_ , ch. 42

# Timing (III)

The father had been but waiting until his son should begin to ask him questions, for watchfulness of himself and others had taught him how useless information is to those who have not first desired it, how poor in influence, how soon forgotten; and now that the fitting condition had presented itself, he was ready.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 1, ch. 5

# The truth about character

How different a sudden action flashed off the surface of a man's nature may be from that which, had time been given, would have unfolded itself from its depths!

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 1, ch. 8

# Wrong for the right reasons

A man may be right although the creed for which he is and ought to be ready to die, may contain much that is wrong.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 1, ch. 17

# Age and youth

The young as well as the old recognize that they belong to each other.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 2, ch. 21

# Amo ut intelligam (III)

Without love there can be no understanding. Hate will sharpen observation to the point of microscopic vision, affording opportunity for many a shrewd guess, and revealing facts for the construction of the cleverest and falsest theories, but will leave the observer as blind as any bat to the scope of the whole, or the meaning of the parts which can be understood only from the whole; for love alone can interpret.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 2, ch. 31

# Fellowship

He who acts wrong will soon think wrong. Any two persons acting faithfully upon opposite convictions, are divided but by a bowing wall; any two, in belief most harmonious, who do not act upon it, are divided by infinite gulfs of the blackness of darkness, across which neither ever beholds the real self of the other.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 2, ch. 34

# A recipe for stagnation

Her feelings were now in danger of being turned back upon herself, and growing bitter; for a lasting sense of injury is, of the human moods, one of the least favourable to sweetness and growth.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 2, ch. 34

# Judging by results

"I believed that I was called." "Called by whom, Dorothy?" "I thought – I thought, my lord, it might be the same that called Samuel...Yet surely I mistook, for see what hath come of it...' "We must not judge from one consequence where there are a thousand yet to follow," said his lordship.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 2, ch. 35

# What dogs and cats know

Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 2, ch. 36

# A soldier's prayer

O God of battles! who, thyself dwelling in peace, beholdest the strife, and workest thy will thereby, what that good and perfect will of thine is I know not clearly, but thou hast sent us to be doing, and thou hatest cowardice. Thou knowest I have sought to choose the best, so far as goeth my poor ken, and to this battle I am pledged. Give me grace to fight like a soldier of thine, without wrath and without fear. Give me to do my duty, but give the victory where thou pleasest. Let me live if so thou wilt; let me die if so thou wilt – only let me die in honour with thee. Let the truth be victorious, if not now, yet when it shall please thee; and oh! I pray, let no deed of mine delay its coming. Let my work fail, if it be unto evil, but save my soul in truth.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 3, ch. 50

# Letting go

It was a troubled night, the last they spent in the castle. Not many slept. But the lord of it had long understood that what could cease to be his never had been his, and slept like a child.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 3, ch. 54

# He that keepeth Israel

Many a look did Dorothy cast around her as she rode, but only once, on the crest of a grassy hill that rose abrupt from the highway a few miles from Raglan, did she catch sight of Richard mounted on Lady. All her life after, as often as trouble came, that figure rose against the sky of her inner world, and was to her a type of the sleepless watch of the universe.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 3, ch. 55

# The way to know

The greatest fact of all is that we are bound to obey the truth, and that to the full extent of our knowledge thereof, however _little_ that may be. This obligation acknowledged and _obeyed_ , the road is open to all truth – and the _only_ road. The way to know is to do the known.

_St. George and St. Michael_ , vol. 3, ch. 56

# More than having

A man that can do things is greater than any man who only has things.

_There and Back_ , ch. 22

# Arguing (IV)

Richard neither understood his last words, nor knew that he did not understand them. But he did understand that it was better to watch the sunrise than to talk of it....It was no argument, but the presence of God that silenced the racked heart of Job.

_There and Back_ , ch. 24

# Influence

Happily, the choice whether we shall be influenced is not given us; happily, too, the choice whether we shall obey an influence is given us.

_There and Back_ , ch. 24

# Waiting (III)

"I don't know his name, and I don't know what he is, or where he lives. But we shall meet again soon." "Then you have made an appointment with him!" "No, I haven't. But there's an undertow bringing us on to each other. It would spoil all if he thought I threw a net for him. I do mean to catch him if I can, but I will not move till the tide brings him into my arms. At least, that is how the thing looks to me at present. I believe enough not to make haste. I don't want to throw salt on any bird's tail, but I do want the birds to come hopping about me, that I may tell them what I know!"

_There and Back_ , ch. 25

# Slow change

The best of changes is slow in most natures, and the main question is, perhaps, whether it goes slowly because of feebleness and instability, and consequent frequency of relapse, or because of the root-nature, the thoroughness, and the magnitude of what has been initiated.

_There and Back_ , ch. 30

# What can be proven (I)

I can't prove it. I can't prove anything – to my own satisfaction, that is, though I dare say I might to the satisfaction of one who did not love the creatures enough to be anxious about them. I don't think you can prove anything that is worth being anxious about.

_There and Back_ , ch. 31

# What can be proven (II)

To prove with your brains the thing you love, would be to deck the garments of salvation with a useless fringe. Shall I search heaven and earth for proof that my wife is a good and lovely woman? The signs of it are everywhere; the proofs of it nowhere.

_There and Back_ , ch. 31

# Who is responsible? (II)

He is in God's school; don't be too much troubled about him, as if God might overlook and forget him. He will see to all that concerns him. He has made him, and he loves him, and he is doing and will do his very best for him.

_There and Back_ , ch. 31

# Wholesome stupidity

Their gardener was blessed with a wholesome stupidity rendering him incapable of unlearning what his father, who had been gardener there before him, had had marvellous difficulty in teaching him. We do not half appreciate the benefits to the race that spring from honest dulness. The _clever_ people are the ruin of everything.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 1, ch. 7

# What can be proven (III)

"Mr. Polwarth," returned Wingfold abruptly, "I cannot even prove there is a God!" "But the church of England exists for the sake of teaching Christianity, not proving that there is a God."

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 1, ch. 17

# Is it just wishful thinking?

"How am I to know that I should not merely have wrought myself up to the believing of that which I should like to be true?" "Leave that question, my dear sir, until you know what that really is which you want to believe. I do not imagine that you have more than the merest glimmer of the nature of that concerning which you, for the very reason that you know not what it is, most rationally doubt. Is a man to refuse to withdraw his curtains lest some flash in his own eyes should deceive him with a vision of morning while yet it is night? The truth to the soul is as light to the eyes: you may be deceived, and mistake something else for light, but you can never fail to know the light when it really comes."

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 1, ch. 19

# If there be no God (I)

When once a man has set out to find God, he must find him or die.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 2, ch. 38

# Handling money

No; there must be a way of handling money that is noble as the handling of the sword in the hands of the patriot. Neither the mean man who loves it, nor the faithless man who despises it, knows how to handle it. The former is one who allows his dog to become a nuisance, the latter one who kicks him from his sight.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 2, ch. 39

# If there be no God (II)

Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 2, ch. 43

# Arguing (V)

"No," he said, "my business is not to prove to any other man that there is a God, but to find him for myself."

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 2, ch. 43

# Did I say the wrong thing?

But the fact of her leaving you so is no sign that you said the wrong thing, – rather the contrary. When people seek advice, it is too often in the hope of finding the adviser side with their second familiar self, instead of their awful first self, of which they know so little. Do not be anxious. You have done your best. Wait for what will come next.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 2, ch. 53

# Irrelevant foreknowledge (II)

Imagine St. Paul having a prevision of how he would be misunderstood, _and heeding it!_ – what would then have become of all those his most magnificent outbursts? And would any amount of apostolic carefulness have protected him?

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 68

# Staggering

"I hope we may have another talk soon," said the [skeptical] doctor, searching for a cork. "Some day I will tell you a few things that may stagger you." "Likely enough: I am only learning to walk yet," said [the priest] Wingfold. "But a man may stagger and not fall, and I am ready to hear anything you choose to tell me."

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 73

# Holding on

It was altogether a time of great struggle with Wingfold. He seemed to be assailed in every direction, and to feel the strong house of life giving way in every part, and yet he held on – lived, which he thought was all, and, without knowing it, grew.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 81

# Seed, not flowers

And now after much thought, the curate saw that he could not hope to transplant into the bosom of the lad the flowers of truth that gladdened his own garden: he must sow the seed from which they had sprung, and that seed was the knowledge of the true Jesus.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 82

# Troubling verses

"But I confess," the curate went on, "those two passages have both troubled me. So I presume will everything that is God's, until it becomes a strength and a light by revealing its true nature to the heart that has grown capable of understanding it. The first sign of the coming capacity and the coming joy, is the anxiety and the question."

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 83

# Death (V)

"Oh!" he sighed, "isn't it good of God to let me die! Who knows what he may do for me on the other side! Who can tell what the bounty of a God like Jesus may be!"

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 84

# Doubt (IV)

"Are you any surer about him, sir, than you used to be?" "At least I hope in him far more," answered Wingfold. "Is that enough?" "No. I want more." "I wish I could come back [after I die] and tell you that I am alive and all is true." "I would rather have the natural way of it, and get the good of not knowing first....Even if he would let me, I would not see him one moment before he thought it best. I would not be out of a doubt or difficulty an hour sooner than he would take me."

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 84

# Constant setbacks

His faith in God was all the time growing – and that through what seemed at the time only a succession of interruptions. Nothing is so ruinous to progress in which effort is needful, as satisfaction with apparent achievement; that ever sounds a halt; but Wingfold's experience was that no sooner did he set his foot on the lowest hillock of self-congratulation than some fresh difficulty came that threw him prostrate; and he rose again only in the strength of the necessity for deepening and broadening his foundations that he might build yet higher, trust yet farther: that was the only way not to lose everything. He was gradually learning that his faith must be an absolute one, claiming from God everything the love of a perfect Father could give, or the needs he had created in his child could desire; that he must not look to himself first for help, or imagine that the divine was only the supplement to the weakness and failure of the human; that the highest effort of the human was to lay hold of the divine.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 86

# Felix culpa (II)

Our crimes are friends that will hunt us either to the bosom of God, or the pit of hell.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 88

# Why we won't forgive

I suspect it is the weight of her own crime that makes her so fierce to avenge her daughter. I doubt if anything makes one so unforgiving as guilt unrepented of.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 88

# A stage of repentance

Even my crime looks like something done ages ago. I know it is mine, and I would rather it were not mine, but it is as if a great cloud had come and swept away the world in which it took place. I am afraid sometimes that I am beginning not to care even about that. I say to myself, I shall be sorry again by and by, but I can't think about it now. I feel as if I had handed it over to God to lay down where I should find it again when I was able to think and be sorry.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 89

# Feelings

There are many feelings in us that are not able to get up stairs the moment we call them. Be as dull and stupid as it pleases God to let you be, and trouble neither yourself nor him about that, only ask him to be with you all the same.

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 89

# What a woman requires

George, I never could love a man who believed I was going to die for ever....It may be only a whim – I can prove nothing any more than you – but I have a – whim then – to be loved as an immortal woman, the child of a living God, and not as a helpless bastard of Nature!

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 97

# If there be no God (II)

I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one?

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ , vol. 3, ch. 97

# Biography

A biography cannot be constructed with the art of a novel, for this reason: that a novel is constructed on the artist's scale, with swift-returning curves; a biography on the divine scale, whose circles are so large that they shoot beyond this world, sometimes even before we are able to detect in them the curve by which they will at length round themselves back towards completion. Hence, every life must look more or less fragmentary...

_The Vicar's Daughter_ , ch. 36

# Is this of God?

Where two things are both of God, it is not likely they will be found mutually obstructive.

_The Vicar's Daughter_ , ch. 44

# God's way (III)

God likes far better to help people from the inside than from the outside.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 10

# Safety

To know one's-self as safe amid storm and darkness, amid fire and water, amid disease and pain, even during the felt approach of death, is to be a Christian, for that is how the Master felt in the hour of darkness, because he knew it a fact.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 15

# Troubles

But such things are but clouds, and cannot but pass. Ah, reader! it may be your cloud has not yet passed, and you scorn to hear it called one, priding yourself that your trouble is eternal. But just because you are eternal, your trouble cannot be. You may cling to it, and brood over it, but you cannot keep it from either blossoming into a bliss, or crumbling to dust. Be such while it lasts, that, when it passes, it shall leave you loving more, not less.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 19

# My contribution

But Grizzie was not well pleased that her master should so lightly pass the reasoned portion of her utterance; like many another prophet, she prized more the part of her prophecy that came from herself, than the part that came from the Lord.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 20

# The faith God cares about

Evidently, if visions would make us sure, God does not care about the kind of sureness they can give, or for our being made sure in that way....God will have us sure of a thing by knowing the heart whence it comes; that is the only worthy assurance. To know, he will have us go in at the great door of obedient faith; and if anybody thinks he has found a backstair, he will find it land him at a doorless wall. It is the assurance that comes of inmost beholding of himself, of seeing what he is, that God cares to produce in us. Nor would he have us think we know him before we do, for thereby thousands walk in a vain show.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 22

# How faith is different from resignation

"And how make the best of this?" asked Cosmo. "Simply by falling in with God's design in the making of you. That design must be worked out – cannot be worked out without you. You must walk in the front of things with the will of God – not be dragged in the sweep of his garment that makes the storm behind him! To walk with God is to go hand in hand with him, like a boy with his father. Then, as to the other world, or any world, as to the past sorrow, the vanished joy, the coming fear, all is well; for the design of the making, the loving, the pitiful, the beautiful God, is marching on towards divine completion, that is, a never ending one. Yea, if it please my sire that his infinite be awful to me, yet will I face it, for it is his. Let your prayer, my son, be like this:'O Maker of me, go on making me, and let me help thee. Come, O Father! here I am; let us go on. I know that my words are those of a child, but it is thy child who prays to thee. It is thy dark I walk in; it is thy hand I hold.'"

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 22

# A teachable spirit

All Cosmo's superiority came of his having faith in those who were higher than he. True, he had not yet been tried; but the trials of a pure, honest, teachable youth, must, however severe, be very different from those of one unteachable. The former are for growth, the latter for change.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 22

# Questions

Every question is a door-handle.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 23

# Misfortune

But before he reached his destination, what people call a misfortune befell him. I do not myself believe there is any misfortune; what men call such is merely the shadow-side of a good.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 24

# Perspective

"Tak th' loaf," she said; "it'll be aw the same in less than a hunder year."

( _Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 24)

# Tomorrow's care (II)

Some say that care for the morrow is what distinguishes the man from the beast; certainly it is one of the many things that distinguish the slave of Nature from the child of God.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 24

# Next best

Like most of us, they were ready to do _their next best_ for him.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 26

# Difficulty

It must be ever in the shape of difficulty that the most precious revelations first appear. Even Mary, to whom first the highest revelation came, and came closer than to any other, had to sit and ponder over the great matter, yea and have the sword pass through her soul, ere the thoughts of her heart could be revealed to her.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 40

# How to understand things readily

The capacity of the old man for taking in what was new, was wonderful, and yet not to be wondered at, seeing it was the natural result of the constant practice of what he learned – for all truth understood becomes duty. To him that obeys well, the truth comes easy; to him who does not obey, it comes not, or comes in forms of fear and dismay. The true, that is the obedient man, cannot help seeing the truth, for it is the very business of his being – the natural concern, the correlate of his soul.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 44

# Doing God's work

Cosmo listened, and thereafter restrained himself, having no right to overwork his companions; yet notwithstanding he had cause, many a time in after life, to remember the too great exertion of that day. Even in the matter of work a man has to learn that he is not his own, but has a master, whom he must not serve as if he were a hard one. When our will goes hand in hand with God's, then are we fellow-workers with him in the affairs of the universe – not mere discoverers of his ways, watching at the outskirts of things, but labourers with him at the heart of them.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 45

# Uncertainty

The part of discipline he liked least – a part of which doubtless we do not yet at all understand the good or necessity – was uncertainty of duty, the uncertainty of what it was God's will he should do. But on the other hand, perhaps the cause of that uncertainty was the lack of perfect readiness; perhaps all that was wanted to make duty plain was absolute will to do it.

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ , ch. 50

# A harmless mistake

The longer they lived the prouder she grew of him and of his work; nor was she the less the practical wisdom of the house that she looked upon her husband as a great man. He was not a great man – only a growing man; yet was she nothing the worse for thinking so highly of him; the object of it was not such that her admiration caused her to deteriorate.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 2

# Reasoning with a child

The dawn of reason will doubtless help to develop obedience; but obedience is yet more necessary to the development of reason. To require of a child only what he can understand the reason of, is simply to help him to make himself his own God – that is a devil.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 2

# Respectability

To be altogether respectable is not to be clean.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 5

# Sweet water and bitter

The co-existence of good and evil in the same person is perhaps the most puzzling of all facts.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 5

# Good arguments

And selfishness rarely fails of good arguments. Nor can anything destroy it but such a turning of things upside down as only he that made them can work.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 5

# Tender mercies

"Have you been seeing the fishes?...They are not well kept; the glass is dirty, and the water, too....I can't bear to see creatures pining. It would be a good deed to poison them all." "Wouldn't it be better to give them some fresh water?" said little Saffy, "that would make them glad." To this wisdom there was no response.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 6

# Hate

He that hates his brother is always a murderer, not always he that kills him.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 6

# To thine own self be true (II)

She gave them no hard words, but generally more counsel than comfort – always, however, the best she had, which was of Polonius' kind, an essence of wise selfishness, so far as selfishness can be wise, with a strong dash of self-respect...

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 6

# Spiritual clumsiness

He was a good man, who saw some truths clearly, and used them blunderingly.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 9

# Men and women (VIII)

Women are being constantly misled by the fancy and hope of being the saviours of men! It is natural to goodness and innocence, but not the less is the error a disastrous one....But it may well be that a woman does more to redeem a man by declining than by encouraging his attentions....God cares nothing about keeping a man respectable; he will give his very self to make of him a true man. But that needs God; a woman is not enough for it. This cannot be God's way of saving bad men.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 14

# Nature's meaning

For if once the suspicion wake that God never meant the things that go to and fro in us as we gaze on the world, that moment is the universe worthless as a doll to a childless mother. If God be not, then steam-engine and flower are in the same category. No; the steam-engine is the better thing, for it has the soul of a man in it, and the flower has no soul at all. It cannot mean if it is not meant. It is God that means everything as we read it, however poor or mingled with mistake our reading may be. And the soothing of his presence in what we call nature, was beginning to work on Hester, helping her toward that quietness of spirit without which the will of God can scarce be perceived.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 22

# God's way (IV)

But as to doing what he wills with a word – see what it cost him to redeem the world! He did not find that easy, or to be done in a moment without pain or toil. Yea, awfully omnipotent is God. For he wills, effects and perfects the thing which, because of the bad in us, he has to carry out in suffering and sorrow, his own and his Son's. Evil is a hard thing for God himself to overcome. Yet thoroughly and altogether and triumphantly will he overcome it; and that not by crushing it underfoot – any god of man's idea could do that! – but by conquest of heart over heart, of life in life, of life over death. Nothing shall be too hard for the God that fears not pain, but will deliver and make true and blessed at his own severest cost.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 23

# The wrong kind of waiting

Most people, I fear, wait till they are inclined to seek him. They do not stir themselves up to lay hold on God; they breathe the dark airs of the tomb till the morning break, instead of rising at once and setting out on their journey to meet it.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 26

# Disagreements

Unity of opinion is not necessary to confident friendship and warm love.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 36

# How God takes care of us

Hester had it on her lips to say that if he was meant to die of the small-pox, he might as well take it of her as of another; but she said instead that she was sure God took care of her, but not sure she should not die of the small-pox. "How can you say God takes care of you if he lets you die of the small-pox!" "No doubt people would die if God forgot them, but do you think people die because God forgets them?" "My dear cousin Hester, if there is one thing I have a penchant for, it is common sense! A paradox I detest with my whole soul!" "One word, dear major Marvel: Did God take care of Jesus?" "Of course! of course! But he wasn't like other men, you know." "I don't want to fare better, that is, I don't want to have more of God's care than he had....If I die of the small-pox, it will not be because it could not be helped, or because I caught it by chance; it will be because God allowed it as best for me and for us all."

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 39

# The temple

Death is the door to the temple-house, whose God is not seated aloft in motionless state, but walks about among his children, receiving his pilgrim sons in his arms, and washing the sore feet of the weary ones. Either God is altogether such as Christ, or the Christian religion is a lie.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 43

# How good things begin (I)

Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life...is growth....Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly – I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 48

# Teaching

Except when some particular case required attention, he never went on trying to teach with his soul weary. He would carry material aid or social comfort, but would not teach. His soul must be shining – with faith or hope or love or repentance or compassion, when he unveiled it. "No man," he would say, "will be lost because I do not this or that; but if I do the unfitting thing, I may block his way for him, and retard his redemption." He would not presume beyond what was given him – as if God were letting things go wrong, and he must come in to prevent them! He would not set blunted or ill tempered tools to the finest work of the universe!

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 48

# Patience

Hester felt sadly chilled, and very hopeless. But she had begun to learn that one of the principal parts of faith is patience, and that the setting of wrong things right is so far from easy that not even God can do it all at once. But time is nothing to him who sees the end from the beginning; he does not grudge thousands of years of labor. The things he cares to do for us require our co-operation, and that makes the great difficulty: we are such poor fellow-workers with him! All that seems to deny his presence and labour only, necessitates a larger theory of that presence and labour. Yet time lies heavy on the young especially, and Hester left the room with a heavy heart.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 53

# Respectawiggle

He would, like Ahab, walk softly; he was not ready to walk uprightly...

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 53

# Waiting for direction

But she could not see how to set about it. She had no light, and seemed to have no leading – felt altogether at a standstill, without impulse or energy. She waited, therefore, as she ought; for much harm comes of the impatience that outstrips guidance. People are too ready to think something must be done, and forget that the time for action may not have arrived, that there is seldom more than one thing fit to be done, and that the wrong thing must in any case be worse than nothing.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 54

# Discipline

[His son] richly deserved the punishment, but God would not have struck him that way. There was the poison of hate in the blow.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 57

# Righteous altogether

One with eyes opening into both worlds could hardly weep over any law of the Father.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 59

# Ambition (III)

The world is a fine thing to save, but a wretch to worship.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 60

# How good things begin (II)

This is indeed a divine law! There shall be no success to the man who is not willing to begin small. Small is strong, for it only can grow strong. Big at the outset is but bloated and weak. There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing; but there never was any truly great thing that did not begin small.

_Weighed and Wanting_ , ch. 60

# Prayer

And if there was a good deal of superstition mingled with her prayer, the main thing in it was genuine, that is, the love that prompted it; and if God heard only perfect prayers, how could he be the prayer-hearing God?

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 1, ch. 6

# Misplaced tenderness

There are tender-hearted people who virtually object to the whole scheme of creation; they would neither have force used nor pain suffered; they talk as if kindness could do everything, even where it is not felt. Millions of human beings but for suffering would never develop an atom of affection. The man who would spare _due_ suffering is not wise. It is folly to conclude a thing ought not to be done because it hurts. There are powers to be born, creations to be perfected, sinners to be redeemed, through the ministry of pain, that could be born, perfected, redeemed, in no other way.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 1, ch. 10

# Fear

Fear is a wholesome element in the human economy; they are merely silly who would banish it from all association with religion. True, there is no religion in fear; religion is love, and love casts out fear; but until a man has love, it is well he should have fear.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 1, ch. 11

# To thine own self be true (III)

As to the vulgar notion of a man's obligation to himself, he had learned to despise it. "Rubbish!" Ian would say. "I owe my self nothing. What has my self ever done for me, but lead me wrong? What but it has come between me and my duty – between me and my very Father in heaven – between me and my fellow man!

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 1, ch. 16

# More than permanence

They sought what would not merely last, but must go on growing.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 21

# Nature's lessons

Some of Nature's lessons you must learn before you can understand them.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 29

# Drowning (II)

"I can't help being frightened!" she panted. "We are in God's arms," returned Ian. "He is holding us." "Are you sure we shall not be drowned?" she asked. "No; but I am sure the water cannot take us out of God's arms."

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 30

# Every disappointment

The recognition of inexorable reality in any shape, or kind, or way, tends to rouse the soul to the yet more real, to its relations with higher and deeper existence. It is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good. All who dream life instead of living it, require some similar shock. Of the kind is every disappointment, every reverse, every tragedy of life. The true in even the lowest kind, is of the truth, and to be compelled to feel even that, is to be driven a trifle nearer to the truth of being, of creation, of God. Hence this sharp contact with Nature tended to make Christina less selfish.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 30

# What men call life

"No man cares much about what the idiots of the world call life! What is it whether we live in this room or another? The same who sent us here, sends for us out of here!" "Most men care very much! You are wrong there!" "I don't call those who do, men! They are only children! I know many men who would no more cleave to this life than a butterfly would fold his wings and creep into his deserted chrysalis-case. I do care to live – tremendously, but I don't mind where. He who made this room so well worth living in, may surely be trusted with the next!"

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 30

# Drowning (III)

"But God is with them, Mercy. If he were not, it would be bad indeed! Where he is, all is well!" She sat up, and putting out her hand, laid it in his great palm. "I wish I could believe that!" she said; "but you know people _are_ drowned sometimes!" "Yes, surely! but if God be with them what does it matter! It is no worse than when a mother puts her baby into a big bath."

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 30

# Does God interfere?

"You saved my life, Ian!" she said one evening for the tenth time. "It pleased God you should live," answered Ian. "Then you really think," she returned, "that God interfered to save us?" "No, I do not; I don't think he ever interferes." "Mr. Sercombe says everything goes by law, and God never interferes; my father says he does interfere sometimes." "Would you say a woman interfered in the management of her own house? Can one be said to interfere where he is always at work? He is the necessity of the universe, ever and always doing the best that can be done, and especially for the individual, for whose sake alone the cosmos exists. If we had been drowned, we should have given God thanks for saving us."

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 31

# Men and women (IX)

To save man or woman, the next thing to the love of God is the love of man or woman; only let no man or woman mistake the love of love for love!

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 31

# Nest egg

Annihilation had long closed in upon the fund which the chief regarded as the sheet-anchor of his clan: he trusted in Mammon, and Mammon had played him one of his rogue's-tricks. The most degrading wrong to ourselves, and the worst eventual wrong to others, is to trust in any thing or person but the living God: it was an evil thing from which the chief had sore need to be delivered. Even those who help us we must regard as the loving hands of the great heart of the universe, else we do God wrong, and will come to do them wrong also.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 32

# Still vulnerable

The laird was one in whom was no guile, but he was far from perfect: any man is far from perfect whose sense of well-being could be altered by any change of circumstance. A man unable to do without this thing or that, is not yet in sight of his perfection, therefore not out of sight of suffering. They who do not know suffering, may well doubt if they have yet started on the way _to be_. If clouds were gathering to burst in fierce hail on the head of the chief, it was that he might be set free from yet another of the cords that bound him. He was like a soaring eagle from whose foot hung, trailing on the earth, the line by which his tyrant could at his will pull him back to his inglorious perch.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 32

# Losing the land

Do you not see that the love of our mother earth is meant to be but a beginning; and that such love as yours for the land belongs to that love of things which must perish? You seem to me not to allow it to blossom, but to keep it a hard bud; and a bud that will not blossom is a coffin. A flower is a completed idea, a thought of God, a creature whose body is most perishable, but whose soul, its idea, cannot die. With the idea of it in you, the withering of the flower you can bear. The God in it is yours always. Every spring you welcome the daisy anew; every time the primrose departs, it grows more dear by its death. I say there must be a better way of loving the ground on which we were born, than that whence the loss of it would cause us torture.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 32

# God's way (V)

It were hard to say what she expected – something half magical rather than anything quite natural. The notions people have of spiritual influence are so unlike the facts, that, when it begins they never recognize it, but imagine something common at work. When the Lord came, those who were looking for him did not know him: – was he not a man like themselves! did they not know his father and mother!

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 33

# If you had died

"What an escape I have had!" "I do not like to hear you say that!" returned Ian. "You have been taken care of all the time. If you had died in the cold, it would not have been because God had forgotten you; you would not have been lost."

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 2, ch. 34

# Meddling (III)

"Nothing good will come of it!" she said, with a strong feeling of unfitness in the thing. "Everything will come of it, mother, that God would have come of it," answered Ian. "She is an honest, good girl, and whatever comes of it must be good, whether pleasant or not." The mother was silent. She believed in God, but not so thoroughly as to abjure the exercise of a subsidiary providence of her own. The more people trust in God, the less will they trust their own judgments, or interfere with the ordering of events.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 3, ch. 35

# True action

There is no action in fretting...and not much in the pondering of consequences. True action is the doing of duty, come of it heartache, defeat, or success.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 3, ch. 35

# Complaint against God (I)

And therewith awoke in her the first movement of divine relationship – rose the first heave of the child-heart toward the source of its being. It appeared in the form of resistance. Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about him.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 3, ch. 39

# Complaint against God (II)

You must ask him to explain himself to you, and not take it for granted, because he has done what you do not like, that he has done you a wrong.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 3, ch. 39

# Imaginary crosses

As yet he was more of a Christian philosopher than a philosophical Christian. The thing most disappointing to him he would treat as the will of God for him, and try to make up his mind to it, persuading himself it was the right and best thing – as if he knew it the will of God. He was thus working in the region of supposition, and not of revealed duty; in his own imagination, and not in the will of God. If this should not prove the will of God concerning him, then he was spending his strength for nought. There is something in the very presence and actuality of a thing to make one able to bear it; but a man may weaken himself for bearing what God intends him to bear, by trying to bear what God does not intend him to bear.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 3, ch. 40

# Hypotheticals

We have no right to school ourselves to an imaginary duty. When we do not know, then what he lays upon us is _not to know_ , and to be content not to know. The philosopher is he who lives in the thought of things, the Christian is he who lives in the things themselves. The philosopher occupies himself with God's decree, the Christian with God's will; the philosopher with what God may intend, the Christian with what God wants _him to do_.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 3, ch. 40

# Waiting (IV)

"We are waiting for God!" said Alister at length. "Waiting is loving," answered Mercy.

_What's Mine's Mine_ , vol. 3, ch. 44

# Reading

It is not, somehow, an interesting evening. Yet if I found just this evening well described in a novel, I should enjoy it heartily. The poorest, weakest drizzle upon the window-panes of a dreary roadside inn in a country of slate-quarries, possesses an interest to him who enters it by the door of a book, hardly less than the pouring rain which threatens to swell every brook to a torrent. How is this? I think it is because your troubles do not enter into the book and its troubles do not enter into you, and therefore nature operates upon you unthwarted by the personal conditions which so often counteract her present influences.

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ , introduction

# Error-hunting

It was better in his eyes to say you were wrong than to say you were right, even if you should be much more right than wrong. He had not the smallest idea of siding with the truth in you, of digging about it and watering it until it grew a great tree in which all your thought-birds might nestle and sing their songs; but he must be ever against the error – forgetting that the only antagonist of the false is the true.

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ , ch. 16

# Stony goodness

A good man I do not doubt he was; but he did the hard parts of his duty to the neglect of the genial parts, and therefore was not a man to help others to be good.

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ , ch. 16

# Persecutors

It is often incapacity for defending the faith they love which turns men into persecutors.

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ , ch. 18

# Doubt (V)

Do you know, Wilfrid – I don't believe my father is quite sure himself, and that is what makes him in such a rage with anybody who doesn't think as he does. He's afraid it mayn't be true after all.

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ , ch. 19

# Size

The sun is reflected in a dewdrop as in the ocean.

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ , ch. 20

# Order

Order...is only another kind of light.

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ , ch. 32

# Preparation for suffering

Suffering is perhaps the only preparation for suffering: still I was but poorly prepared for what followed.

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ , ch. 58

# An illusion

People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed.

_A Double Story_ , ch. 3

# If you would be a blessed creature

Rosamond, if you would be a blessed creature instead of a mere wretch, you must submit to be tried.

_A Double Story_ , ch. 12

# Unsystematic theology

Thus she was in a measure saved from the perplexity which comes of any _one_ definition of the holy secret, compelling a man to walk in a way between walls, instead of in a path across open fields.

_Alec Forbes of Howglen_ , ch. 44

# The only victory

So there was but one way of setting matters right, as Mr. Malison had generosity enough left in him to perceive; and that was, to make a friend of his adversary. Indeed there is that in the depths of every human breast which makes a reconciliation the only victory that can give true satisfaction.

_Alec Forbes of Howglen_ , ch. 24

# Evil is boring

For all wickedness tends to destroy individuality, and declining natures assimilate as they sink.

_Alec Forbes of Howglen_ , ch. 69

# What words can't repair

It was a bitter hour. Eternity must be very rich to make up for some such hours.

_Alec Forbes of Howglen_ , ch. 69

# The heart's cup

Even her new love did not more than occasionally ruffle the flow of her inward river. She had long cherished a deeper love, which kept it very calm. Her stillness was always wandering into prayer; but never did she offer a petition that associated Alec's fate with her own; though sometimes she would find herself holding up her heart like an empty cup which knew that it was empty.

_Alec Forbes of Howglen_ , ch. 81

# The gate

Amongst those who sit down at the gate till one shall come and open it, are to be found both the wise and the careless children.

_Alec Forbes of Howglen_ , ch. 88

# Bibliography _(_ from _Wikipedia_ , _"George MacDonald")_

Fantasy

_Phantastes: A Fairie Romance for Men and Women_ (1858)

"Cross Purposes" (1862)

_Adela Cathcart_ (1864), containing "The Light Princess", "The Shadows", and other short stories

_The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders, Commonly Called "The Second Sight"_ (1864)

_Dealings with the Fairies_ (1867), containing "The Golden Key", "The Light Princess", "The Shadows", and other short stories

_At the Back of the North Wind_ (1871)

_Works of Fancy and Imagination_ (1871), including _Within and Without_ , "Cross Purposes", "The Light Princess", "The Golden Key", and other works

_The Princess and the Goblin_ (1872)

_The Wise Woman: A Parable_ (1875)

_The Gifts of the Child Christ and Other Tales_ (1882; republished as _"Stephen Archer" and Other Tales_ )

_The Day Boy and the Night Girl_ (1882)

_The Princess and Curdie_ (1883), a sequel to _The Princess and the Goblin_

_The Flight of the Shadow_ (1891)

_Lilith: A Romance_ (1895)

Realistic fiction

_David Elginbrod_ (1863; republished as _The Tutor's First Love_ ), originally published in three volumes

_Alec Forbes of Howglen_ (1865; republished as _The Maiden's Bequest_ )

_Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood_ (1867)

_Guild Court: A London Story_ (1868)

_Robert Falconer_ (1868; republished as _The Musician's Quest_ )

_The Seaboard Parish_ (1869), a sequel to _Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood_

_Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood_ (1871)

_Wilfrid Cumbermede_ (1871–72)

_The Vicar's Daughter_ (1871–72), a sequel to _Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood_ and _The Seaboard Parish_

_The History of Gutta Percha Willie, the Working Genius_ (1873), usually called simply _Gutta Percha Willie_

_Malcolm_ (1875)

_St. George and St. Michael_ (1876)

_Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ (1876; republished as _The Curate's Awakening_ )

_The Marquis of Lossie_ (1877; republished as _The Marquis' Secret_ ), the second book of _Malcolm_

_Paul Faber, Surgeon_ (1879; republished as _The Lady's Confession_ ), a sequel to _Thomas Wingfold, Curate_

_Sir Gibbie_ (1879; republished as _The Baronet's Song_ )

_Mary Marston_ (1881; republished as _A Daughter's Devotion_ )

_Warlock o' Glenwarlock_ (1881; republished as _Castle Warlock_ and _The Laird's Inheritance_ )

_Weighed and Wanting_ (1882; republished as _A Gentlewoman's Choice_ )

_Donal Grant_ (1883; republished as _The Shepherd's Castle_ ), a sequel to _Sir Gibbie_

_What's Mine's Mine_ (1886; republished as _The Highlander's Last Song_ )

_Home Again: A Tale_ (1887; republished as _The Poet's Homecoming_ )

_The Elect Lady_ (1888; republished as _The Landlady's Master_ )

_A Rough Shaking_ (1891)

_There and Back_ (1891; republished as _The Baron's Apprenticeship_ ), a sequel to _Thomas Wingfold, Curate_ and _Paul Faber, Surgeon_

_Heather and Snow_ (1893; republished as _The Peasant Girl's Dream_ )

_Salted with Fire_ (1896; republished as _The Minister's Restoration_ )

_Far Above Rubies_ (1898)

Poetry

_Twelve of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis_ (1851), privately printed translation of the poetry of Novalis

_Within and Without: A Dramatic Poem_ (1855)

_Poems_ (1857)

" _A Hidden Life" and Other Poems_ (1864)

" _The Disciple" and Other Poems_ (1867)

_Exotics: A Translation of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis, the Hymn-book of Luther, and Other Poems from the German and Italian_ (1876)

_Dramatic and Miscellaneous Poems_ (1876)

_A Book of Strife, in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul_ (1880), privately printed

_The Threefold Cord: Poems by Three Friends_ (1883), privately printed, with Greville Matheson and John Hill MacDonald

_Poems_ (1887)

_The Poetical Works of George MacDonald, 2 Volumes_ (1893)

_Scotch Songs and Ballads_ (1893)

_Rampolli: Growths from a Long-planted Root_ (1897)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald
