George Macdonald on SMALL BEGINNINGS

"Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea. God's beginnings are imperceptible, whether in the region of soul or of matter. Besides, I believe in no good done save in person--by personal operative presence of soul, body and spirit. God is the one only person, and it is our personality alone, so far as we have any, that can work with God's perfect personality. God can use us as tools, but to be a tool of, is not to be a fellow-worker with. How the devil would have laughed at the idea of a society for saving the world! But when he saw one take it in hand, one who was in no haste even to do that, one who would only do the will of God with all his heart and soul, and cared for nothing else, then indeed he might tremble for his kingdom! It is the individual Christians forming the church by their obedient individuality, that have done all the good done since men for the love of Christ began to gather together. It is individual ardour alone that can combine into larger flame. There is no true power but that which has individual roots. Neither custom nor habit nor law nor foundation is a root. The real roots are individual conscience that hates evil, individual faith that loves and obeys God, individual heart with its kiss of charity."

(Weighed and Wanting)

George Macdonald on TEACHING RUINED BY FOLLOWERS

The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.

(Weighed and Wanting)

George Macdonald on COURTESY

... but in how many a family, the members of which are far from despising each other, does it not seem judged unnecessary to cultivate courtesy! Surely this could not be if a tender conscience of the persons and spiritual rights of others were not wanting. If there be any real significance in politeness, if it be not a mere empty and therefore altogether hypocritical congeries of customs, it ought to have its birth, cultivation and chief exercise at home. Of course there are the manners suitable to strangers and those suitable to intimates, but politeness is the one essential of both. I would not let the smallest child stroke his father's beard roughly. Watch a child and when he begins to grow rough you will see an evil spirit looking out of his eyes. It is a mean and bad thing to be ungentle with our own. Politeness is either a true face or a mask. If worn at one place and not at another, which of them is it? And there were no mask if there ought not to be a face. Neither is politeness at all inconsistent with thorough familiarity. I will go farther and say, that no true, or certainly no profound familiarity is attainable without it. The soul will not come forth to be roughly used. And where truth reigns familiarity only makes the manners strike deeper root in the being, and take a larger share in its regeneration.

...

The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes. Some will make the poor defense that it is unmanly to show one's feelings: it is unmanly, because conceited and cowardly to hide them, if, indeed, such persons have anything precious to hide. Other some will say, "Must I weigh my words with my familiar friend as if I had been but that moment presented to him?" I answer, It were small labor well spent to see that your coarse-grained evil self, doomed to perdition, shall not come between your friend and your true, noble, humble self, fore-ordained to eternal life. The Father cannot bear rudeness in his children any more than wrong:--my comparison is unfit, for rudeness is a great and profound wrong, and that to the noblest part of the human being, while a mere show of indifference is sometimes almost as bad as the rudest words. And these are of those faults of which the more guilty a man is, the less is he conscious of the same.

(Weighed and Wanting)

George MaDonald on THE BODY

Let us first ask what is the use of this body of ours. It is the means of Revelation to us, the camera in which God's eternal shows are set forth. It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our fellow-men, with all their revelations of God to us. It is through the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both trained outwards from ourselves, and driven inwards into our deepest selves to find God. There is glory and might in this vital evanescence, this slow glacier-like flow of clothing and revealing matter, this ever uptossed rainbow of tangible humanity. It is no less of God's making than the spirit that is clothed therein.

(Unspoken Sermons)

Michel Quoist on A CHILD'S EYES

When pure eyes meet yours, it is I who smile at you through the flesh.
But on the other hand I know of nothing sadder than lifeless eyes in the face of a child.
The windows are open but the house is empty.
Two eyes are there but there is no light.
And, saddened, I stand at the door, and wait in the cold and knock.I am eager to get in.
And he, the child, is alone.
He fattens, he hardens, he dries up, he gets old. Poor old fellow!

Alleluia! Alleluia!
Open, all of you, little old men!
It is I, your God, the Eternal, risen from the dead, coming to bring back to life the child in you.

Hurry! Now is the time. I am ready to give you again the beautiful face of a child, the beautiful eyes of a child . . .
For I love youngsters, and I want everybody to be like them.”

(Prayers of Life)

George MacDonald on SACRIFICE, BEING AND DOING

Thousands that are capable of great sacrifices are yet not capable of the little ones which are all that are required of them. God seems to take pleasure in working by degrees; the progress of the truth is as the permeation of leaven, or the growth of a seed: a multitude of successive small sacrifices may work more good in the world than many a large one. What would even our Lord's death on the cross have been, except as the crown of a life in which he died daily, giving himself, soul, body and spirit, to his men and women? It is the AND that is the precious thing. Being is the mother to all little Doings as well as the grown-up Deeds and the mighty heroic Sacrifice; and these little Doings, like the good children of the house, make the bliss of it.

(Weighed and Wanting) 

Robert L. Short on HELL

"Only through obedience do we know "the fullest life" now; and only through the fullest life are we made sure of eternal life for us and for all men. He that does not actively love God, has no assurance of God's love for him. Both the Christian and the non-Christian, all, are destined for eternal life with God. But there is a basic difference: the Christian knows it. By staking his life on an event that occurred in the past, God's decisive revelation of himself in Christ, the Christian is given joy in the present that also assures him of another "great joy which will come to all the people" --in the future. So then, when we say there is a "hell" of a difference between the Christian and the non-Christian, this is the hell we mean ... "For us there is one God, the Father, from whom all being comes, towards whom we move .... But not everyone knows this" (1 Cor 8:6, 7, NEB). The job of the Christian, then, the "wise guy" who "knows this," is simply to acquaint the "others" with the same knowledge: that God has already secured their salvation; and that men can begin to know and enjoy this salvation even now by abandoning their shaky little foundations that are "driving them crazy," and instead basing their lives on the firm footing that is Christ alone. From the point of view of the Christian, non-Chrstians are people who think they are their own captains "perishing on a stormy sea. But in reality they are not in a sea where one can drown, but in shallow water, where it is impossible to drown. Only they do not know it" (Brunner - The Christian Doctrine of God). The Christian, along with his fellow men, is on his way home to the Father. But the Christian knows this and knows moreover that much of the fun can be in getting there, that it is not necessary to go through a hell on earth to get to the eternal destiny of us all -- heaven. This he knows is the very act of attempting to lighten the load for others along the way by sharing with them the same happy knowledge. This knowledge is the good news of a victory already won not just for part of the world, for those who believe or who are good; but it is the knowledge that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor 5:19)."

(The Parables of Peanuts)