The Baron's Apprenticeship Quotes

“What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest;”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“No one, however strong he may feel his obligations, will ever be man
enough to fulfill them except that he be a Christian-that is,one who,
like Christ, cares first for the will of the Father.”
― George MacDonald, The Baron's Apprenticeship

“But this part of my dream, the most lovely of all, I can find no words to describe; nor can I even recall to my own mind the half of what I felt. I only know that something was given me then, some spiritual apprehension, to be again withdrawn, but to be given to us all, I believe, some day, out of his infinite love, and withdrawn no more. Every heart that had ever ached, or longed, or wandered, I knew was there, folded warm and soft, safe and glad. And it seemed in my dream that to know this was the crown of all my bliss—yes, even more than to be myself in my Father's arms. Awake, the thought of multitude had always oppressed my mind; it did not then. From the comfort and joy it gave me to see them there, I seemed then first to know how my own heart had ached for them.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“When I am out of sight, he may think of me again and want to see me—as Job said his maker would." "I don't remember," said Barbara. "Tell me." "He says to God—I was reading it the other day—'I wish you would hide me in the grave till you've done being angry with me! Then you would want to see again the creature you had made; you would call me, and I would answer!' God's not like that, of course, but my father might be.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“Things that we are right in thinking 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, and they seem bad because they are so far above us in goodness that we see them partially and untruly? There must be room in his wisdom for us to mistake! He would try to trust! He would say, "If thou art my father, be my father, and comfort thy child. Perhaps thou hast some way! Perhaps things are not as thou wouldst have them, and thou art doing what can be done to set them right! If thou art indeed true to thy own, it were hard not to be believed—hard that one of thine own should not trust thee, should not give thee time to make things clear, should behave to thee as if thou wouldst not explain, when it is that we are unable to understand!”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“He rebelled against the highest as if the highest were the lowest—as if the power that could create a heart for bliss, might gloat on its sufferings.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“heaven is high and deep, and its lower air is music; in the upper regions the music may pass, who knows, merging unlost, into something endlessly better!”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about;”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“what is the love of child, or mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another being—which is a being just because he shines through it.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“God is just!' said a carping theologian to me the other day. 'Yes,' I answered, 'and he cannot be pleased that you should call that justice which is injustice, and attribute it to him!”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“The righteousness that makes a man visit the sins of a father upon his children, is the righteousness of a devil, not the righteousness of God. When God visits the sins of a father on his children, it is to deliver the child from his own sins through yielding to inherited temptation.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“I will be glad!" he said, "even in the midst of a world of rain!—Yet again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me to assert joy and resist sadness?—After all, what is there to be merry about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but if I don't like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out with smiles, and applaud at the end?—I don't see what there is to make me miserable, and I don't see what there is to make me glad!”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“Instead of automatically blaming the person who does not believe in God, we should ask first if his notion of God is a God that ought to be believed in.”
― George MacDonald, The Baron's Apprenticeship

“The thing most alien to the true idea of humanity is the notion that our well-being lies in surpassing our fellows. We have to rise above ourselves, not above our neighbors, to take all the good of them not from them, and give them all our good in return. That which cannot be freely shared can never be possessed.”
― George MacDonald, The Baron's Apprenticeship

“The poetry of life, the inner side of nature, rises near the surface to meet the eyes of the man who makes. The advantage gained by the carpenter of Nazareth at his bench is the inheritance of every workman as he imitates his maker in the divine - that is, honest - work.”
― George MacDonald, The Baron's Apprenticeship

“to teach is the best way to learn, but that the imperfect are the best teachers of the imperfect.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“A slave will amuse himself in his dungeon; a free man must file through his chains and dig through his prison-walls before he can frolic.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think—only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“For God alone is our salvation; to know him is salvation. He is in us all the time, else we could never move to seek him.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“He began to wonder whether even an all-mighty and all-good God would be able to contrive such a world as no somebody in it would ever complain of. What if he had plans too large for the vision of men to take in, and they were uncomfortable to their own blame, because, not seeing them, they would trust him for nothing?”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“is it not better to complain if one but complain 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?”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“Who invented music? Some one must have made the delight of it possible! With his own share in its joy he had had nothing to do! Was Chance its grand inventor, its great ingenieur? Why or how should Chance love loveliness that was not, and make it be, that others might love it? Could it be a deaf God, or a being that did not care and would not listen, that invented music? No; music did not come of itself, neither could the source of it be devoid of music!”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“The good in a true book, he would say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of a book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true reader for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“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 Father permitted but never ordained sacrifice; in tenderness to his children he ordered the ways of their unbelieving belief.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“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 would 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 be, and give ourselves up to him heart and soul and hands and history.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“It is one thing to believe in a God; it is quite another to believe in God! Every time we grumble at our fate, every time we are displeased, hurt, resentful at this or that which comes to us, every time we do not receive the suffering sent us, "with both hands," as William Law says, we are of the same spirit with this half-crazy woman.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“He did not accept the good news of God; he strained it to his heart, and was jubilant over it.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she supposed, that ought to be done—something she had no inclination to dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God, required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention of going to church; therefore she went sometimes.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back

“no man really denies a thing which he knows only by the words that stand for it. When John Tuke denied the God in his notion, he denied only a God that could have no existence.”
― George MacDonald, There & Back