There and Back

by George MacDonald

It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does.

“Then why do you believe it?” asked Barbara, influenced by the talk of the century. “Because I can,” answered Wingfold. “To believe and to be able to prove, have little or nothing to do with each other. To believe and to convince have much to do with each other.”

To prove with your brains the thing you love, would be to deck the garments of salvation with a useless fringe. Shall I search heaven and earth for proof that my wife is a good and lovely woman? The signs of it are everywhere—the proofs of it nowhere.”

he never lay in wait for a verbal victory. He took his companion as equal to himself.

“But why did he let them come into it?” “That God will tell them, to their satisfaction, as soon as they shall have become capable of understanding it.

It seems to me, if a thing be bad, it cannot possibly be true. If you say the thing is, I answer it exists because of something beneath the badness. Badness by itself can have no life in it.

What to most clergymen would have seemed the depth of a winter of unbelief seemed to Wingfold a springtime full of the sounds of rising sap.

But no one ever found Wingfold dull. For one thing he scarcely thought about the church, and never mistook it for the kingdom of God. Its worldly affairs gave him no concern, and

though he was the servant of the boundless church, no church was his master. He had no master but the one lord of life.

The will of God was all Wingfold cared about, and if the church was not content with that, the church was nothing to him, and might do to him as it would. He did not spend his life for the people because he was a parson, but he was a parson because the church of England gave him facilities for spending his life for the people.

When the Lord is known as the heart of every joy, as well as the refuge from every sorrow, then the altar will be known for what it is—an ecclesiastical antique.

The world would not perish if what is called the church went to pieces. A truer church, for there might well be a truer, would arise out of her ruins. But let no one seek to destroy.

“Mr. Wingfold said that it was not fair, when a man had made something for a purpose, to say it was not good before we knew what his purpose with it was.

God wants to do something better with people than people think.’”

“There must be a reason for everything,” he said to himself, “but some reasons are hard to find!”

It is so easy for those who lie to imagine that another is lying!

You cannot prove to him that there is any God. A God that could be proved, would not be worth proving.

Wake the notion of a God such as will draw him to wish there were such a God.

What good would it be, what could it bring but the more condemnation, that a man should be sure there was a God, if he did not cry to him?

If a thing be true in itself, it is not capable of proof, and that man is in the higher condition who is able to believe it.

Do you hold any door in your nature open for the possibility of a God having a claim on you? The truth is, as I hinted before, that you are not drawn to the idea because you do not like it. That is why you turn away, not because you have no proof.

he hates things that most men think nothing of, and will send any suffering upon them rather than have them continue indifferent to them.

she was well-born and well-bred for caring about nothing except herself.

Many who out of the pulpit appear men, are in it little better than hawkers of old garments, the worse for their new patches.

His low position, in fact, and the absence of any thought in the direction of marriage left but the wider room for the love infinite. In a man capable of loving in such fashion, there is no limit to the growth of love.

I believe we are meant to go on living forever, and I believe the business of eternity is to bring grand hidden things out into the light.

The loss of all that the world counts first things is a thousandfold repaid in the waking to higher need.

For no one can be saved without the will being supreme in the matter, without choosing to resist the wrong and do the right.

A man must come up to the Master, hearken to his word, and do as he says. Then he will come to know God, and to know that he knows him.

Days are dreary unto death which wrap no hope in their misty folds.

she went to church with the idea that she was doing something for God in going.

Until we know God, we seek to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about, while the things for which he sent his Son, we regard of little or no importance.

When a man knows, then first he gets a glimpse of his ignorance as it vanishes. Ignorance cannot be the object of knowledge. We must believe ourselves ignorant. And for that we must be humble of heart.

Jesus is perfect, but is our idea of him perfect? One thing only is changeless truth in us, and that is—obedient faith in him and his father. Even that has to grow. It is by acting upon what he sees and knows, hearkening to every whisper, obeying every hint of the good, following whatever seems light, that the man will at length arrive. Thus obedient, instead of burying himself in the darkness about its roots, he climbs to the tree-top of his being.

So long as a man is satisfied, he seeks nothing. When a fresh gulf is opened in his being, he must rise and find that which will fill it. Our history is the opening of such gulfs, and the search for what will fill them.

not the best self, which is able to forget itself,

Even their religion, like that of most, had little shape or colour. What there was of it was genuine, but it was much too weak to pass over to help of another.

Would it not be better to deny him completely than to murmur and rebel against him? But perhaps it is better to complain, if one complains to God himself. Does he not then draw nigh to God with what truth is in him? And will he not then fare as Job, to whom God drew nigh in return, and set his heart at rest?

Why should not a man at least wait and see what the possible God was going to do with him, perhaps for him, before he accused or denied him? At worst, he would be no worse for the waiting!

What did it matter whether he was happy or not if all was well with her?

What we rightfully conceive bad must be bad to God as well as to us, but may there not be things so far above us that we cannot take them in, that seem bad because they are so far above us in goodness that we see them only partially and untruly?

Perhaps things are not as thou wouldst have them, and thou art doing what can be done to set them right. Give me time to trust thee.

A little knowledge may be good, but the largest half-knowledge is a dangerous thing!

The perfect love would not fail because one of his children was sick!

But there is a power of judging between the moods themselves, with a perception of their character and nature, and the comparative clarity of insight in each.

A man’s self-stereotyped thinking is unfavourable to revelation—his mind works too strongly in its familiar channels. But illness, in weakening these habits and breaking down these channels, strengthens more primary and original modes of vision.

their own dullness, cased in their own habits, bound by their own pride to foregone conclusions,

What a joy to think that a man may, while still unsure about God, yet be coming close to him! How else should we be saved at all?

He is in us all the time, otherwise we could never move to seek him.

When a man finds he is not what he thought, that he has been talking of high things but only imagining he belonged to their world, he is on the way to discovering that he is not up to his duty in the smallest things.