Perhaps the closest family friend was Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), who, Greville writes, was "especially intimate in our home, as in our hearts" (GMDW, 301). He calls him "Uncle Dodgson," and recalls how the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland was first submitted to MacDonald for his evaluation ("illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches and minutely penned in printing characters" (GMDW, 342). MacDonald suggested it be read to his children for their reactions, and as a result of their lively enthusiasm it was published. This friendship is understandable because the two men shared a love of children and an especial ability to recreate imaginatively a children's world.

George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish minister, novelest and poet. He wrote stories for adults and children, and traveled in the circles of the most influential thinkers of his day, including John Ruskin and Lewis Caroll. His fantasy novels are among the founding documents of that contemporary genre, and writers he influenced include C.S. Lewis, who called MacDonald "my master." See The George MacDonald WWW Page

With two of the more prominent literati listed above, Arnold and Ruskin, MacDonald shared a vivid sense of moral urgency. Although Arnold and Ruskin stand rather far from MacDonald's religious commitment, MacDonald consistently placed the necessity of adhering to high moral concepts above any sectarian agreement on the dogmatic doctrinal basis for these concepts, and, unlike most Evangelicals, he could find an enriching fellowship with men of differing doctrinal persuasions. He did share common ground with both men: Arnold celebrated Wordsworth, whom MacDonald greatly admired for, among other qualities, the strength of his moral vision and his application of moral ideas to life, and Ruskin built a careful argument for a moral aesthetic.² In addition, MacDonald acted as a confidante to Ruskin during his tumultuous love affair with Rose La Touche, an episode about which Greville includes much interesting material (GMDW, 328ff.).

The friends who did most to influence the direction of MacDonald's theological thinking during this time were the aforementioned Alexander John Scott and Frederick Denison Maurice. Little can be said about the precise religious position of Scott, since he left no important writings. His orthodoxy had also been questioned —he was disfranchised from the Presbyterian ministry for preaching universalism —and thus he was able to encourage and counsel sympathetically the rejected minister from Arundel at the crucial time of his moving to Manchester. But the most prominent Victorian theologian to influence MacDonald's thought was Maurice. He was an ambivalent figure who, like MacDonald, tended to be too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals. He was ahead of his time, a High Churchman with a social conscience —he coined the phrase "Christian Socialism" and was the leader of that movement in the 1840's. Throughout his career as educator and minister he published widely. He was a Trinitarian but was more Unitarian than Evangelical. Most Evangelical formulations of doctrine appeared too crass and materialistic to him, and he repeatedly attempted a more profoundly spiritual interpretation of the biblical "proof texts" used by Evangelicals to establish these positions. A man whose deep practical spirituality lent a moral beauty to his life, Maurice was ecumenical in spirit, feeling that there was some truth in all religious experience, Christian and otherwise.

MacDonald became a disciple of his in the late 1850's. Among the ideas that MacDonald clearly shared with him were his stress upon the Fatherhood of God and the conviction that Christ is absolutely at one with the Father (a doctrine that renders impossible any view of the Atonement as bringing about a change in God's attitude toward man-forgiveness was God's disposition from eternity past). Both rejected the idea that sin would be eternally punished, emphasized the "Inner Light" with the possibility of revelation to the individual apart from Scripture (but not inharmonious with it), and insisted that theology undergirds all of life, all branches of knowledge being subservient to it.

Within the Christian Socialist movement being shaped by Maurice, Charles Kingsley was a prominent novelist. Although MacDonald was not actively a part of this movement, he shared Kingsley's concern for the social and religious problems of the laboring people. ³ MacDonald's novels Robert Falconer and Guild Court manifest this type of social concern. The Water Babies, Kingsley's moralizing fairy story published in 1863, also bears a resemblance, perhaps derivative, to MacDonald's Phantastes (1858).

CONCLUSION

George MacDonald tried earnestly to humanize his Calvinist theological inheritance, both directly, through theological essays, and indirectly, through novels, fantasies, and children's fairy tales. On the theological and literary scenes, he stood somewhat apart from his contemporaries. With characteristic humility, he avoided engaging others in controversy or criticizing his contemporaries by name. He was a poet and novelist, not a controversialist, and he was devoted to reaching as many people as he could with his vision of the true nature of life. He dedicated his artistic talents to helping people who were alienated from contemporary Christianity because it presented a God too small in his purposes and concerns and a view of life that was unrealistic and distorted. He felt his art could show that a true faith became joyous as it discovered that fully following Christ turned everyday life into an exciting adventure. Writing novels gave him the opportunity to lay bare the very core of human nature and experience, where he saw his principles confirmed. There was a God-shaped vacuum in every human heart.

MacDonald was not a thinker concerned only with internal matters in Evangelicalism, unaware or unheeding of the great issues that confronted the church in his day. He deplored the encroachments of the mechanistic approach of science upon any of the sundry aspects of life. He hated any expression of materialism as well, and treated with keen irony anyone who felt that money was the answer to one's ills. Certainly he did not think that money should be despised, but rather that it should be viewed as sacred-a means to possible good. The tendency of the period to associate material progress with spiritual values, looking upon riches as a proper reward for work combined with the proper virtues, was to him contemptible.

He was undisturbed by certain contemporary ideas that influenced some other authors to alter greatly or reject completely their orthodox Christian heritage. The rise of evolutionary theory, which many Evangelicals saw as devastating to their faith, was something MacDonald welcomed. Like Robert Browning, he saw it as lending strong support to his doctrine of individual spiritual development and growth, and it reinforced his optimism for the moral future of mankind. Another source of attack on Christian faith, German Higher Criticism of the biblical text, left many intellectuals of the period spiritually bereft, but it disturbed MacDonald little. He was not perturbed chiefly because he felt the raw intellect simply was unable to comprehend Christianity apart from the response of full obedience. The purpose of the written word was to enable the reader to meet the Living Word, Christ. He has little to say about Higher Criticism in his writings, but an essay in Orts on Browning's "Christmas Eve" shows his full agreement with that poet's ironic handling of the Gottingen professor who epitomizes for Browning the German rationalist approach to Christianity. The nineteenth-century movements toward social reform received his full sympathy, apparent in his books like Robert Falconer, in which the selfless hero helps the poor slum dwellers.

One must observe, however, that MacDonald's theology stops appreciably short of nineteenth-century liberalism. He had a strong vision of personal evil and the necessity of purgation from it, and hence had a clear vision of the consuming fires of God's holiness. The righteousness he championed differs from that of the liberal in that he insisted it is not self-generated; it is produced rather by the presence of Christ within the believer. Nor does righteousness earn salvation, being a product of God's indwelling energies. His emphasis upon subjective experience was not at the expense of the objective reality of God. To MacDonald, man is subsumed in that reality; to the liberal, God is subsumed within the ego. MacDonald's doctrines of the subjugation of the self and of personal immortality also make him distinct from his liberal friends.

MacDonald's convictions have, then, abundant expression in various literary types: sermons, poems, novels, and fantasies. This book will focus greatest attention upon the fantasies and fairy tales for two reasons: first, because his achievement reaches its highest level in this mythopoeic art; and second, because the difficult symbolism of the fantasies may be illumined by carefully noting what specific convictions helped to shape his art. In The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie a basic theme is that salvation is in its very nature the experience of growing in righteousness.

1. This patronage gives interesting insight into Lady Byron's character: MacDonald stood considerably nearer her ideal than did her late husband. She is fictionalized as Lady Bernard in The Vicar's Daughter —a most flattering portrait.[return]

2. See Arnold's poem "Memorial Verses" for his general tribute and his article on Wordsworth for his specific emphasis upon Wordsworth's morality; see MacDonald's essay "Wordsworth's Poetry," ADO, 245-263, for his assessment of Wordsworth. Ruskin outlines his moral aesthetic in Modern Painters.[return]

3. Joseph Ellis Baker, The Novel and the Oxford Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932). Though old, this is a useful study of how the novel was at this time used for religious purposes. Baker discusses a number of minor religious novelists. So also does Robert Lee Woolf in Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: Garland, 1977). Woolf is good for plot summaries.[return]

This excerpt is from Rolland Hein's book The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Journey of George MacDonald, published in 1999 by Cornerstone Press Chicago.