There and Back

by George MacDonald

He makes the bold assertion that it is better to be an honest, open-minded atheist than a so-called Christian who believes in a false god.

In Paul Faber Surgeon it is sin that leads to truth. In There and Back it is goodness that leads to truth

This highly individual and invisible blowing of the Spirit’s winds is the reason MacDonald hated plans of salvation. The road to truth, and to the deep reality of the process of being “born again,” cannot be boxed into a one-size-fits-all formula.

He knew neither argument nor attempted persuasion was of any use. Those hungering for God’s deep truths would find them. When that hunger brought them to him, only then would he speak.

To become able to make something is, I think, necessary to thorough development. I would rather have a son of mine a carpenter, a watchmaker, a woodcarver, a shoemaker, a jeweller, a blacksmith, a bookbinder, than have him earn his living as a clerk in a bank. Not merely is the cultivation of such skills a better education in things human, it brings a man nearer to everything practical.

It is the privilege of some kinds of labour to be compatible with thoughts of higher things.

a denial involving no assertion cannot witness to any truth.

Had he put his rather flimsy position logically, it would have been this—I never knew such things, I do not like the notion of them, therefore I deny them. They do not exist.

Is a child not to seek his father, because he cannot prove he is alive?

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,

The denial of every falsehood under the sun would not generate one throb of life.

As the brewer looks down on the baker, so the bookbinder looked down on the blacksmith.

In the roughest part of his history it was his habit to go to church—almost entirely for the organ. How much he understood may be a question somewhat dependent on how much there may have been to understand.

old ideas are for pondering, not discarding, lad.”

All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness

Selfishness, I repeat, whether in the form of vanity or greed, is our poverty.

The idea had never arisen in his brain that he was in the world by no creative intent of his own.

A man’s one claim on manhood is that he can call upon God—not the God of any theology, right or wrong, but the God out of whose heart he came and in whose heart he is.

She had an oppressive sense of the claims of God but no personal relationship with him through which he could give his loving help to her for the duties of her life. She had no window to let in the perpendicular light of heaven.

He had no opportunity of learning what any vital believer in the Lord of religion might have to say. His only view of Christianity was a hopelessly distorted one.

She was one of the select few that meet every person on the common ground of humanity, with no thought of station or rank. She affected nothing. She would have spoken the same way to prince or poet-laureate or blacksmith.

Arthur Lestrange, sir Wilton’s heir.

Richard was in high spirit—for no reason but that his spirits were high. He was happy because he was happy. He had indeed begun to learn that a man must mind his duty before his happiness.

“What a grand place for thinking!” said Richard to himself. But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the thoughts that came to him—he never said to them, Come. Neither, when ideas came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him till he saw what they meant. He did not search out their pedigree, get them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or, in short, be themselves to him.

A man must assert what is highest in him, else he cannot lay hold of the best—a man must will to be glad, else deserve to be sorrowful.

The highest property, Dante says, increases to each by the sharing of it with others.

Nature was a noble lady whose long visit made him glad, but she was not yet at home in his house.

She had indeed brought to bear upon him, without knowing it, that humbling and elevating power which ideal womankind has always had, and will eternally have upon genuine manhood.

Pious people in general seem to regard religion as a necessary accompaniment of life. To Wingfold it was life itself—with him God must be all, or he could be nothing.

Wingfold approached her with the air of a man who knew himself unwelcome but did not much mind—for he did not have to care about himself.

I won’t worship him.” “Who wants you to worship him? You must be a very different person before he would care much for your worship. You can’t worship him while you think him what you do. He is something quite different.”

He believed himself wise in human nature, when in truth he was only quick to read in another what lay within the limited range of his own consciousness.

With his hazy yet keen cold eye, he was quick to see in another, and prompt to lay to his charge, the faults he pardoned in himself.

His wife had tamed him a good deal, without in the least reforming him.

Nothing but his lower nature had ever roused him to action of any kind.

One of four gates stands open to us: To deny the existence of God, and say we can do without him. To acknowledge his existence, but say he is not good and act as true men resisting a tyrant. To say “I wish there were a God,” and be miserable because there is none. Or to say there must be a God and he must be perfect in goodness or he could not exist, and then give ourselves up to him heart and soul and hands and history.

the whole of good things is to be the messengers of love—to carry love from one heart to the other.

I must find him! He can’t have made me and not care when I ask him to speak to me!

“Just imagine,” she said, “if God were all the time at our backs, giving us one lovely thing after another, trying to make us look around and see who it was that was so good to us! Imagine him standing there wondering when his little one would look round and see him. If only I had him to love!

Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering father!

From an early age Richard had been accustomed to despise the form he called God which stood in the gallery of his imagination, carved at by the hands of successive generations of sculptors—some hard, some feeble, some clever, some stupid, all conventional and without prophetic imagination. His antagonism had long taken the shape of an angry hostility to the notion of any God whatever. Richard could see a thing to be false—that is, he could deny, but he was not yet capable of receiving what was true, because he had not yet set himself to discover truth. To oppose, to refute, to deny is not to know the truth.

The human niche where the idea of a God must stand, was in Richard’s house occupied by the most hideous falsity. On the pedestal crouched the goblin of a Japanese teapot.

It was not pleasant to Richard to imagine any one with rights over him.

the idea of a God worth believing in, was coming a little nearer to him, was becoming to him a little more thinkable.

Instead of automatically blaming the person who does not believe in a God, we should ask first if his notion of God is a god that ought to be believed in.

The sins of the poor are not once mentioned in the Bible, the sins of the rich very often.

I will not believe in any such God!” Of course he was more than right in refusing to believe in such a God!

“A false hope cannot do so much harm as a false fear!”

If such lies were told, and believed, about an innocent girl trying to do her duty, why may not people have told lies about God, and people believed them?

she loved what she saw to be good, and knew how to send a selfish thought back to its place. She knew nothing of the Norman conquest, but she knew much of self-conquest.