There & Back

by George MacDonald

She had married a quarter for faith, a quarter for love, and a whole half for hope.

urged to live by a hunger and thirst he had not invented,

A woman love-brooding over a child is at the gate of heaven; to take her child from her is to turn her away from more than paradise.

The great heath was all around, solitary as the heaven out of which the solitary moon, with no child to comfort her, was enviously watching them.

When she left for Mortgrange, they had agreed that her husband should say she was gone to her father's; and as nobody where they lived knew who or where her father was, nobody had the end of any clue.

To become able to make something is, I think, necessary to thorough development. I would rather have son of mine a carpenter, a watchmaker, a wood-carver, a shoemaker, a jeweller, a blacksmith, a bookbinder, than I would have him earn

What advantage the carpenter of Nazareth gathered from his bench, is the inheritance of every workman, in proportion as he does divine, that is, honest work.

For, after a fashion of his own, Tuke was a philosopher and a politician. But his politics were those of the philosopher, not of the politician.

Richard, unable to possess more than a very few, manifested his veneration for them in another and nearer fashion, running, as was natural and healthy, in the lines of his calling.

His reverence for the inner reality, the book itself, in itself beyond time and decay, had roused in him a child-like regard for its body, for its broken inclosure and default of manifestation.

But however much the youth delighted in it, he could not but find the work fidgety and tiring; whence ensued the advantage that he left it the oftener for a ramble, or a solitary hour on the river.

He accepted her encouragement, however, to forsake his work as often as he felt inclined.

It is the privilege of some kinds of labour, that they are compatible with thoughts of higher things.

The religious system brought to bear on his youth had operated but feebly on his conscience, and not at all on his affections.

"I would bear a good deal rather than run the risk of going so fast asleep as to stop dreaming it. A man can die any time," he continued, "but he can't dream when he pleases! I would wait! One can't tell when things may take a turn! There are many chances on the cards!"

"That's true," replied Arthur; but plainly the very chances were a weariness to him.

Look at the butterflies! They take what comes, and don't grumble at their sunshine because there's only one day of it."

"Well, when they lie crumpled in the rain, they're none the worse that they didn't think about it beforehand! We must make the best of what we have!"

subtle effluences are subtle influences.

a denial involving no assertion, cannot witness to any truth;

A man will be judged, however, by his truth toward what he professes to believe;

John was far truer to his perception of the duty of man to man than are ninety-nine out of the hundred of so-called Christians to the things they profess to believe.

For, true enough, there was no God of the kind John denied;

only, what if, in delivering his kind from the tyranny of a false God, he aided in hiding from them the love of a true God—of a God that did and ought to exist?

How much of Christianity a child may or may not learn by going to church, it is impossible to say; but certainly Richard did not learn anything that drew his heart to Jesus of Nazareth, or caught him in any heavenly breeze, or even the smallest of celestial whirlwinds!

eyes so bright and scintillant that one might fancy they caught and kept for their own use the sparks that flew from his hammer.

The man as can do anything, can do everything."

To honour your father an' mother don't mean to stick by their chimbley-corner all your life, but to start from their front door and go foret.

All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness, which is his one impoverishment, and draws near to his wealth, which is humanity—not humanity in the abstract, but the humanity of friends and neighbours and all men. Selfishness, I repeat, whether in the form of vanity or greed, is our poverty.

It had not occurred to him that there was a stage in his history antecedent to his consciousness—a

He had never reflected that he had not made himself, and that therefore there might be a power somewhere that had called him into being, and had a word to say to him on the matter.

She had not attempted to teach Richard more, in the way of religion, than the saying of certain prayers, a ceremony of questionable character; but the boy, dearly loving his mother, and saddened by her lack of spirits, had put things together—amongst the rest, that she was always gloomiest on a Sunday—and concluded that religion was the cause of her misery. This made him ready to welcome the merest hint of its falsehood. Well might the doctrine be false that made such a good woman miserable! He had no opportunity of learning what any vital, that is, obedient believer in the lord of religion, might have to say. Nothing he did hear would, without the reflex of his mother's unhappiness, have waked in him interest enough for hate: what was there about the heap of ashes he heard called the means of grace, to set him searching in it for seeds of truth! If we consider, then, the dullness of the prophecy, the evident suffering of his mother, and the equally evident though silent contempt of his father, we need not wonder that Richard grew up in what seemed to him a conviction that religion was worse than a thing of nought, was an evil phantom, with a terrible power to blight; a miasm that had steamed up from the foul marshes of the world, before man was at home in it, or yet acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature. It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which could not be entreated, because it did not exist; to believe in what was not, must be ruinous to the na...

But that she was not a child, he saw the moment she was down; and he soon discovered that, not her beauty, but her heavenly vivacity, was the more captivating thing in her. At once her very soul seemed to go out to meet whatever object claimed her attention. She must know all about everything, and come into relations with every live thing!

Her mind seemed working in company with his hands;

He had indeed begun to learn that a man has his duty to mind before his happiness, and that was much; but he had not yet been tried in the matter of doing his duty when unhappy. How would he feel then? Would he think duty without happiness worth living for?

Often indeed even the farthest horizon could not prevent her from feeling that she had come to a dead country; that things here did not mean anything; that the life was out of them. Was the world so crowded with men and their works as to shut out from her the Presence?

But He is there for them that seek him, not for those who do not look for him. Till they do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him.