Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III

by George MacDonald

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

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Paperback, 416 pages

Published May 29th 2008 by BiblioLife (first published 1866)

tags: theology, spirituality, 19th century, writing, faith, christianity, essays, classics, religion, nonfiction, literature, christian

Book Quotes

“There are three conceivable kinds of punishment—first, that of mere retribution, which I take to be entirely and only human—therefore, indeed, more properly inhuman, for that which is not divine is not essential to humanity, and is of evil, and an intrusion upon the human; second, that which works repentance; and third, that which refines and purifies, working for holiness. But the punishment that falls on whom the Lord loveth because they have repented, is a very different thing from the punishment that falls on those whom he loveth in deed but cannot forgive because they hold fast by their sins.”

― George MacDonald

“Justice demands your punishment, because justice demands, and will have, the destruction of sin.”

― George MacDonald

“The faith which will remove mountains is that confidence in God which comes from seeking nothing but his will.”

― George MacDonald

“Our God, we will trust thee. Shall we not find thee equal to our faith? One day, we shall laugh ourselves to scorn that we looked for so little from thee; for thy giving will not be limited by our hoping.”

― George MacDonald

“The aspiring child is often checked by the dull disciple who has learned his lessons so imperfectly that he has never got beyond his school-books. Full of fragmentary rules, he has perceived the principle of none of them. The child draws near to him with some outburst of unusual feeling, some scintillation of a lively hope, some wide-reaching imagination that draws into the circle of religious theory the world of nature, and the yet wider world of humanity, for to the child the doings of the Father fill the spaces; he has not yet learned to divide between God and nature, between Providence and grace, between love and benevolence;—the child comes, I say, with his heart full, and the answer he receives from the dull disciple is—" God has said nothing about that in his word, therefore we have no right to believe anything about it. It is better not to speculate on such matters. However desirable it may seem to us, we have nothing to do with it. It is not revealed." For such a man is incapable of suspecting, that what has remained hidden from him may have been revealed to the babe. With the authority, therefore, of years and ignorance, he forbids the child, for he believes in no revelation but the Bible, and in the word of that alone. For him all revelation has ceased with and been buried in the Bible, to be with difficulty exhumed, and, with much questioning of the decayed form, re-united into a rigid skeleton of metaphysical and legal contrivance for letting the love of God have its way unchecked by the other perfections of his being.”

― George MacDonald

“You would not even know you were in heaven if you were in it; you would not see it around you if you sat on the very footstool of the throne.”

― George MacDonald

“It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ.”

― George MacDonald

topics: Christ, Church, Faith, Heresy, Obedience

“Our Lord was not in the habit of explaining away his hard words. He let them stand in all the glory of the burning fire wherewith they would purge us.”

― George MacDonald

“It is the soul that makes the body. When we are sons of God in heart and soul, then shall we be the sons of God in body too: "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is".”

― George MacDonald

topics: Body, Heart, Soul

“A man's real belief is that which he lives by;”

― George MacDonald

“When a heart hears - and believes, or half believes - that it is not the child of God by origin, from the first of its being, but may possibly be adopted into His family, its love sinks at once in a cold faint: where is its own father, and who is this that would adopt it?”

― George MacDonald

topics: Adoption, Child, Family, Father

“If God said, “I forgive you,” to a man who hated his brother, and if (as is impossible) that voice of forgiveness should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How would the man interpret it? Would it not mean to him, “You may go on hating. I do not mind it. You have had great provocation, and are justified in your hate”? No doubt God takes what wrong there is, and what provocation there is, into the account; but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the hate, the more reason, if possible, that the hater should be delivered from the hell of his hate, that God’s child should be made the loving child that He meant him to be. The man would think, not that God loved the sinner, but that He forgave the sin, which God never does. Every sin meets its due fate—inexorable expulsion from the paradise of God’s Humanity.”

― George MacDonald

topics: Forgiveness, Love, Sin

“But at length, O God, will you not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire - even into your own consuming self? Death shall then die everlastingly. ... Then indeed will you be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one - O God, we trust in you, the Consuming Fire - shall have been burnt clean and brought home. For if their moans, myriads of ages away, would turn heaven for us into hell - shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall, of all His glories, His mercy alone not be infinite? Shall a brother love a brother more than The Father loves a son? - more than The Brother Christ loves His brother? Would He not die yet again to save one brother more?”

― George MacDonald

topics: Consuming Fire, Death, Eternity, Hell, Mercy, Universalism

“Let a man think and care ever so little about God, He does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him - making life a good thing to him. God gives him Himself, though he knows it not.”

― George MacDonald

topics: Existence, God

“The greatest obscuration of the words of the Lord, as of all true teachers, comes from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them. Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries.”

― George MacDonald

topics: Gospel, Teachers, Theology

“The one use of the Bible is to make us look at Jesus, that through him we might know his Father and our Father, his God and our God. Till we thus know Him, let us hold the Bible dear as the moon of our darkness, by which we travel towards the east; not dear as the sun whence her light cometh, and towards which we haste, that, walking in the sun himself, we may no more need the mirror that reflected his absent brightness.”

― George MacDonald

“God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him.”

― George MacDonald

“God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light, who never in the light sought but the dark.”

― George MacDonald

“the way to worship God while the daylight lasts is to work; the service of God, the only "divine service," is the helping of our fellows.”

― George MacDonald

“Religion is nothing if it be not the deepest common-sense.”

― George MacDonald

topics: Common Sense, Religion

George MacDonald

George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister.

Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, George MacDonald inspired many authors, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle. G. K. Chesterton cited The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had "made a difference to my whole existence."

Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, became friends with him, and there is some evidence that Twain was influenced by MacDonald.

MacDonald grew up influenced by his Congregational Church, with an atmosphere of Calvinism. But MacDonald never felt comfortable with some aspects of Calvinist doctrine; indeed, legend has it that when the doctrine of predestination was first explained to him, he burst into tears (although assured that he was one of the elect). Later novels, such as Robert Falconer and Lilith, show a distaste for the idea that God's electing love is limited to some and denied to others.

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