From Huntly to Bordighera

For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come. HEBREWS 13:14

A boy from Huntly. George MacDonald was born on the tenth of December, 1824, in Huntly, a small market town in Aberdeenshire, in the north-east of Scotland. His family were farmers and weavers who ran a bleaching business and a mill. His mother died when he was eight, and he was brought up by his father, also named George, a man of great patience, humour and quiet goodness. The son never forgot him. Many readers have seen that father behind the wise and gentle fathers who fill MacDonald’s novels, and behind the way he would later speak of God. A man who has known a good father, he believed, has been given a picture, however faint, of the Father of all.

A hard religion. The faith of his boyhood was the strict Calvinism of the Congregational chapel in Huntly, and the boy took it seriously — so seriously that it troubled him. He was taught that God had chosen some for eternal life and passed the rest by, and he could not make himself believe that a God who did such a thing was good. Nor could he stop wanting God. The struggle between the God he was taught and the God his heart longed for would shape everything he wrote. He would spend his life arguing, against the theology of his childhood, that the true God is better than the best that any child can imagine.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. PSALM 103:13

Aberdeen and London. In 1840 he went to King’s College, Aberdeen, where he studied chemistry and natural philosophy and took his degree in 1845. He went south to London and worked for a time as a tutor in a family, and in 1848 he entered Highbury College, a Congregational seminary, to train for the ministry. There he read widely, wrote poetry, and fell in love with Louisa Powell, the daughter of a London leather merchant. He also began to read the German Romantic writers, Novalis above all, whose dreamlike stories and sense of the sacredness of nature would leave their mark on his own.

Arundel. In 1850 he was called as minister of Trinity Congregational Church in Arundel, in Sussex, and in 1851 he married Louisa. Their marriage would last more than fifty years, and they would have eleven children, six sons and five daughters. Arundel did not go well. Within two years some of the leading members of the congregation had accused their young minister of heresy. He had suggested from the pulpit that the heathen who never heard the gospel might have an opportunity after death, and he was said to be tainted with German theology. The deacons did not dismiss him; they cut his salary, hoping he would leave. MacDonald replied that this was bad news, but that he supposed he must try to live on less, and for a while he did, helped by gifts of food from the poorer members of the church, who did not share their deacons’ views. In May 1853 he resigned. He never held a pastorate again.

Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? MATTHEW 6:25

Want and sickness. The years that followed were years of real poverty. The family moved to Manchester, where MacDonald preached to small groups who gathered to hear him, gave lectures and took pupils. He had tuberculosis, the disease that would take several of his children, and there were long seasons when he could do nothing but lie still. Again and again the family’s needs were met, often at the last moment, in ways they could only receive as answers to prayer. Among their helpers was Lady Byron, the poet’s widow, who sought MacDonald out after reading his long dramatic poem Within and Without in 1855, became his friend and patron, and paid for a winter in Algiers that restored his health for a time.

The pen. Shut out of the pulpit, MacDonald turned to writing. In 1858 he published Phantastes, a faerie romance for men and women, in which a young man named Anodos wanders through a dreamlike Fairy Land, meets his own shadow, and learns at last that it is better to love than to be loved. It sold poorly. To support his family he began to write novels of Scottish life — David Elginbrod in 1863, Alec Forbes of Howglen in 1865, Robert Falconer in 1868, and many more — full of crofters, schoolmasters, ministers and plain people who find their way out of a hard religion into the love of God. They made his name. For the rest of his life he wrote steadily, more than fifty books in all, and he lectured on English literature, for a time as a professor at Bedford College in London.

Stories for children. MacDonald also wrote for children, and it is for these books that many people know him best. At the Back of the North Wind, published as a book in 1871, tells of a poor London cab-driver’s son named Diamond and the mysterious lady who carries him through the night. The Princess and the Goblin, in 1872, gave the world the princess Irene, the miner’s boy Curdie, and the great-great-grandmother who spins in the attic, whose invisible thread leads a frightened child safely home through the dark. Short fairy tales such as The Light Princess and The Golden Key followed. Among the friends of the family was a young Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson, who brought the MacDonalds the manuscript of a story he had written for a little girl named Alice. Louisa read it aloud to the children, and their delight persuaded him to publish it.

And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them. MATTHEW 18:2

The unspoken sermons. All the while MacDonald went on preaching wherever he was asked, often in Congregational and Anglican pulpits alike, and writing sermons that no congregation heard. The first series of Unspoken Sermons appeared in 1867, the second in 1885 and the third in 1889. In them he spoke most directly about the things that mattered most to him: that God is our Father and we are truly His children; that obedience, not opinion, is the way to know Him; and that God’s love is not soft but fierce, a fire that will burn away everything in us that is not good.

The family on the road. The MacDonalds were a large, warm and theatrical household. Louisa adapted The Pilgrim’s Progress for the stage, and for years the family performed it together in drawing rooms and halls across England, with MacDonald himself playing Mr Greatheart. In 1872 he was invited to lecture in the United States, and for the better part of a year he travelled from city to city, speaking to large audiences on Burns, Shakespeare and the poets. In 1877 Queen Victoria granted him a small pension from the Civil List, which eased at last the long strain on the family purse.

Sorrow. The pension came just before the hardest years. Their daughter Mary Josephine died of tuberculosis in 1878, and their son Maurice the next year. Grace died in 1884, and Lilia, the eldest, who had nursed so many of the others, in 1891. In 1880, in the midst of these losses, MacDonald printed privately A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul: a short poem of prayer for every day of the year, with a blank page beside each one for the reader’s own prayers. It is one long conversation with God, written by a man in grief and sickness, bringing his doubts, his weariness and his longing straight to his Father.

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him. JOB 13:15

The House of Courage. For the sake of the family’s lungs the MacDonalds had begun to spend their winters on the Italian Riviera, and around Christmas 1880 they moved into a large house at Bordighera that friends had helped them to build. They called it Casa Coraggio, the House of Courage. It became a gathering place for the English community there, with readings, music, worship and plays, and MacDonald preached to whoever would come. Much of his later work was written there.

The long silence. MacDonald’s last major book, Lilith, appeared in 1895. It is a strange, dark dream of death and resurrection, in which even the most rebellious soul is at last brought to lie down and sleep in hope. After it he wrote little. A stroke took his speech, and he spent his last years almost entirely silent, cared for by his family. Louisa died in January 1902. MacDonald lived three more years, and died on the eighteenth of September, 1905, at Ashtead in Surrey. His ashes were buried in the English cemetery at Bordighera, beside Louisa and their daughters Lilia and Grace.

What kind of man. Those who knew him describe a tall, bearded, gentle man with deep-set eyes, a soft Scots voice and a great capacity for delight. He was poor most of his life and never seemed to mind it. He buried four of his children and wrote, in the years of their deaths, some of the most hopeful words he ever wrote. He was suspected of heresy by many in the churches he had grown up in, and he did not answer them with bitterness. He prayed constantly, read the Gospels with a rare attention, and seems to have been, by the testimony of those closest to him, very much the man his books describe: one who trusted his Father in heaven for everything, and who tried, in all he did, to do what Jesus said.

In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. JOHN 14:2

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. MacDonald’s picture of God was shaped by a good earthly father. How has your own father, or the lack of one, shaped your picture of God? Bring it honestly to Him.

2. He lost his only pulpit and spent the rest of his life serving God in other ways. Is there a closed door in your life through which God may be leading you somewhere else?

3. His family’s needs were met again and again in their poverty. Thank God for a time when He provided for you, and trust Him with a present need.

4. He buried four of his children and kept praying. Think of someone you know who is grieving, and pray for that person by name.

5. Read Matthew 6:25–34. Ask God to give you the simple trust that MacDonald learned in want.

A PRAYER

Father, You were caring for George MacDonald in the town where he was born, in the pulpit he lost, in the years of want and in the house of his grief.

Thank You for the good fathers You give, who show us something of Your face; and where my father failed me, show me Yourself.

When doors close, lead me on. When I am poor, feed me. When I mourn, keep me trusting You.

Bring me at last, with all who love You, into the many mansions of Your house, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.