To believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream: to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for Godless repose:–these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength; strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love.

~Georg MacDonald, Perseverance #137

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Perseverance, George MacDonald, Books
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No silly notion of playing the hero–what have creatures like us to do with heroism who are not yet barely honest?

~George MacDonald, A Silly Notion #135

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Heroism, George MacDonald, Books
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He who does that which he sees, shall understand, he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness…. It is he that runneth that shall read, and no other. It is not intended by the speaker of the parables that any other should know intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his injury–what, grasped, perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.

~George MacDonald, The Way of Understanding #108

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Understanding, George MacDonald
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“But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if he knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?”

I answer, What if he knows Prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need–the need of Himself?… Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer… So begins a communion, a taking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may receive: but hat we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower needs, is not God’s end in making us pray, for He could give us everything without that: to bring His child to his knee, God withholds that man may ask.

~George MacDonald, Why Should It Be Necessary #91

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: George MacDonald, Prayer
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If a man forget a thing, God will see to that: man is not Lord of his memory or his intellect. But man is lord of his will, his action; and is then verily to blame when, remembering a duty, he does not do it, but puts it off, and so forgets it. If a man lay himself out to do the immediate duty of the moment, wonderfully little forethought, I suspect, will be found needful. That forethought only is right which has to determine duty, and pass into action. To the foundation of yesterday’s work well done, the work of the morrow will be sure to fit.

Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an archangel.

~George MacDonald, Forethought #75

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Duty, Procrastination, George MacDonald, Discipline
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But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to Him.

~George MacDonald, The Word

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Written over 200 years ago, this little bit of critique as to the dangers of Bible worship comes to me with echoes of apparent fresh revelation from all the recent post modern theologians and Christian contemplatives of the past decade. Somewhere within the conversation of polarized systematic theologians and mystic existentialists there is old wisdom desperately desiring to tame our worries, free our good desires, and allow us to know Christ as the center of our humanness without warping or disparaging the very good gift of the Scriptures. I believe Mr. MacDonald presents this calling in one little powerful package at a time, feels reminiscent of the first time I read through Oswald Chamber’s “My Utmost for His Highest”.

• 
  My Utmost For His Highest: Limited PB Edition
  Author: Oswald Chambers

Categories: Scripture, George MacDonald, My Utmost for His Highest, Books, Theology
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All the morning he was busy…with his heart in trying to content himself beforehand with whatever fate the Lord might intend for him. 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 (to be) 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… 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… We have no right to school ourselves to an imaginary duty. When we do not know, then what he lays upon us in not to know.

~George MacDonald, The Wrong Way with Anxiety

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Anxiety, George MacDonald, Books
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Naturally capable, he had already made of himself rather a dull fellow; for when a man spends his energy on appearing to have, he is all the time destroying what he has, and therein the very means of becoming what he desires to seem. If he gains his end, his success is his punishment.

~George MacDonald, How to Become a Dunce

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Pretense, George MacDonald, Books
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Vain were the fancy, by treatise, or sermon, or poem, or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self–God’s idea of us when He devised us–the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself… “but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.”

~George MacDonald, “The Self”

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Self, George MacDonald, Books
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I learned that it was not myself but only my shadow that I had lost. I learned that it is better…for a proud man to fall and be humbled than to hold up his head in pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barley be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.

~George MacDonald, The Loss of the Shadow

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Manhood, George MacDonald, Work, Books
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They regard the Father of their spirits as their governor! They yield the idea of… “the glad Creator,” and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical, martinet of a God, caring not for righteousness but for His rights: not for the eternal purities, but the goody properties. The prophets of such a God take all the glow, all the hope, all the color, all the worth, out of life on earth, and offer you instead what they call eternal bliss–a pale, tearless hell… But if you are straitened in your own mammon-worshiping soul, how shall you believe in a God any greater than can stand up in that prison chamber?

~George MacDonald, Mean Theologies

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: George MacDonald, Quotes, Books, Theology
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