George MacDonald

“ It is hard upon Him that His own children will not trust Him!”
“If He would but show Himself!”
“The sight of Him now would make us believe in Him without knowing Him; and what kind of faith would that be for Him or for us! We should be bad children, taking Him for a weak parent! We must know Him! When we do, there will be no fear, no doubt. We shall run straight home! Dawtie, shall we go together?”
“Yes, surely, Andrew! God knows I try. I'm ready to do whatever you tell me, Andrew!”
“No, Dawtie! You must never do what I tell you, except you think it right.” ”

“ Had the old man been a developed hypocrite, he would have replied at once: “He certainly ought.” But by word of mouth to condemn himself would have been to acknowledge to himself that he ought to send the cup home, and this he dared not do. Men who will not do as they know, make strange confusion in themselves. The worst rancor in the vessel of peace is the consciousness of wrong in a not all-unrighteous soul. The laird was false to his own self, but to confess himself false would be to initiate a change which would render life worthless to him! ”

“ Alexa was not conceited, but she knew she was handsome, and knew also that Andrew would never feel one heart-throb more because of any such beauty as hers. Had he not as good as told her she was one of the dead who would not come alive! It would be something to be loved by a man like that! But Alexa was too maidenly to think of making any man love her—and even if he loved her she could not marry a man in Andrew's position! ”

“ If God be not each as Jesus, what good would the proving of her innocence be to Dawtie! A mighty thing indeed that the world should confess she was not a thief! But to know that there is a perfect God, one for us to love with all the power of love of which we feel we are capable, is worth going out of existence for; while to know that God himself, must make every throb of consciousness a divine ecstasy!”
Andrew's heart was full, and out of its fullness he spoke. Never before had he been able in the presence of Alexa to speak as he felt. ”

“ She was struck, not with any truth in what he said, but with the evident truthfulness of the man himself. Right or wrong, there was that about him—a certain radiance of conviction—which certainly was not about Mr. Rackstraw.
“The things that can be shaken,” said Andrew, as if thinking with himself, “may last for a time, but they will at length be shaken to pieces, that the things which can not be shaken may show what they are. Whatever we call religion will vanish when we see God face to face.” ”

“ Let George be as rich as a Jew or an American, Alexa would never regard him as her equal! George worshiped money; Alexa worshiped birth and land.
Our own way of being wrong is all right in our own eyes; our neighbor's way of being wrong is offensive to all that is good in us. We are anxious therefore, kindly anxious, to pull the mote out of his eye, never thinking of the big beam in the way of the operation. Jesus labored to show us that our immediate business is to be right ourselves. Until we are, even our righteous indignation is waste. ”

“ It burned within her, not like a sin, but like what it was, a confession unconfessed. Little wrong as she had done, Dawtie was yet familiar with the lovely potency of confession to annihilate it. She knew it was the turning from wrong that killed it, that confession gave the coup de grâce to offense. Still she dreaded not a little the displeasure of her master, and yet she dreaded more his distress.
She prepared the laird's supper with a strange mingling of hope and anxiety: she feared having to go to bed without telling him. ”

“ A new scratch on the bright steel of one of his suits of armor was a scratch on his heart; the moth and the rust troubled him sore, for he could not keep them away; and where his treasure was, there was his heart, devoured by the same moth, consumed by the same rust. He had much suffering from his possessions—was more exposed to misery than the miser of gold, for the hoarded coin of the latter may indeed be stolen, but he fears neither moth nor rust nor scratch nor decay. The laird cherished his things as no mother her little ones. ”

“ The curious smile hovered about the lip of the plow-man; when things to say did not come to him, he went nowhere to fetch them. Almost in childhood he had learned that, when one is required to meet the lie, words are given him; when they are not, silence is better. A man who does not love the truth, but disputes for victory, is the swine before whom pearls must not be cast. Andrew's smile meant that it had been a waste of his time to call upon Mr. Crawford. ”

“ George had a large straggling acquaintance with things, and could readily appear to know more than he did. He was, besides, that most agreeable person to a man with a hobby, a good listener—when he saw reason. He made himself so pleasant that the laird was not only always glad to see him, but would often ask him to stay to supper, when he would fish up from the wine-cellar he had inherited a bottle with a history and a character, and the two would pass the evening together, Alexa trying not to wish him away, for was not her poor old father happy with him! ”

“ Doubtless a man ought to love God so, and we are all sinners just because we do not love God so. But we have the atonement!”
“But, sir,” answered Dawtie, the silent tears running down her face, “I love God that way! I don't care a dust for anything without Him! When I go to bed, I don't care if I never wake again in this world; I shall be where He would have me!”
“You presume, Dawtie! I fear me much you presume! What if that should be in hell?”
“If it be, it will be the best. It will be to set me right. Oh, sir, He is so good! Tell me one thing, sir: when you die—”
“Tut, tut, lass! ”

“ In old times not a few houses in Scotland held a certain tiny room, built for the head of the family, to be his closet for prayer: it was, I believe, with the notion of such a room in his head, that the laird had called his museum his closet; and he was more right than he meant to be; for in that chamber he did his truest worship—truest as to the love in it, falsest as to its object; for there he worshiped the god vilest bred of all the gods, bred namely of man's distrust in the Life of the universe. ”

“ Plainly the man counted it a most important thing to stand well with Him who had created him. When they rose, Alexa looked formally solemn, but the wan face of her father shone: the Psyche, if not the Ego, had prayed—and felt comfortable. He sat down, and looked fixedly, as if into eternity, but perhaps it was into vacancy; they are much the same to most people.
“Come into the study for a moment, Lexy, if you please,” he said, rising at length. His politeness to his daughter, and indeed to all that came near him, was one of the most notable points in his behavior. ”

“ George Crawford, do you believe yourself an honest man?”
“As men go, yes.”
“But not as men go, George? As you would like to appear to the world when hearts are as open as faces?”
He was silent.
“Would the way you have made your money stand the scrutiny of—”
She had Andrew in her mind, and was on the point of saying “Jesus Christ,” but felt she had no right, and hesitated.
“—Of our friend Andrew?” supplemented George, with a spiteful laugh. “The only honest mode of making money he knows is the strain of his muscles—the farmer-way! ”

“ She did not yet see that the will of God lay in another direction altogether than the heartiest reception of dogma!—that God was too great and too generous to care about anything except righteousness, and only wanted us to be good children!—that even honesty was but the path toward righteousness, a condition so pure that honesty itself would never more be an object of thought! ”

“ It ought not to be overlooked that the whole thing was wrought in the children without directed influence of kindred or any neighbor. They imitated none. The galvanism of imitation is not the life of the spirit; the use of form where love is not is killing. And if any one is desirous of spreading the truth let him apply himself, like these children, to the doing of it; not obeying the truth, he is doubly a liar pretending to teach it; if he obeys it already, let him obey it more. It is life that awakes life. ”

“ This is what man was and is meant to be, what man must become; thither the wheels of time are roaring; thither work all the silent potencies of the eternal world; and they that will not awake and arise from the dead must be flung from their graves by the throes of a shivering world.
When he had done speaking Andrew stood and looked up. A few stars were looking down through the limpid air. Alexa rode on. Andrew let her go, and walked after her alone, sure that her mind must one day open to the eternal fact that God is all in all, the perfect friend of His children ”

“ But the sinking of the school-master in the laird seemed to work ill for the man, and good only for the land. I say seemed, because what we call degeneracy is often but the unveiling of what was there all the time; and the evil we could become, we are. If I have in me the tyrant or the miser, there he is, and such am I—as surely as if the tyrant or the miser were even now visible to the wondering dislike of my neighbors. ”

“ As is natural to one who will not do right, he began to argue the moral question, treating it as a point of casuistry that troubled the mind of the girl.
“I don't know that, Dawtie!” he said. “It is not likely that the person that has the cup, whoever he may be—that is, if the cup be still in existence—is the same who stole it; and it would hardly be justice to punish the innocent for the guilty?—as would be the case, if, supposing I had bought the cup, I had to lose the money I paid for it. Should the man who had not taken care of his cup have his fault condoned at my expense? ”

“ The risk that makes you not sure, Dawtie—the risk that is at once the worst and the least—the risk that our hope should be in vain, and there is no God. But, Dawtie, there is that in my heart that cries Christ did die, and did rise again, and God is doing His best. His perfect love is our perfect safety. ”

“ Alexa had reason to fear that her father made a friend of, and never a friend with the mammon of unrighteousness. At the same time the half-penny he put in the plate every Sunday must go a long way if it was not estimated, like that of the poor widow, according to the amount he possessed, but according to the difficulty he found in parting with it.
“After weeks, perhaps months of nursing and food and doctor's stuff,” resumed the laird, “he will walk away, and we shall see not a plack of the money he carries with him. The visible will become the invisible, the present the absent!” ”

“ Rackstraw spoke concerning a being you loved, I would have tried to comfort you by pointing out how false it was. But if you are content to hear God so represented, why should I seek to convince you of what is valueless to you? Why offer you to drink what your heart is not thirsting after? Would you love God more because you found He was not what you were quite satisfied He should be? ”

“ Before people had money they must have misered other things. Some girls miser their clothes, and never go decent!”
“Suppose him a miser,” said Andrew, “what could you do? How are you to help it?”
“That's what I want to know. I love my master, and there must be a way to help it. It was terrible to see him, in the middle of the night, gazing at that cup as if he had found the most precious thing that can ever have existed on the earth.”
“What was that?” asked Andrew.
He delighted in Dawtie's talk. It was like an angel's, he said, both in its ignorance and its wisdom. ”

“ Besides, we're told to love our enemies—then surely we're to love our friends. He has always been a friend to me. He never said a hard word to me, even when I was handling his books. He trusts me with them! I can't help loving him—a good deal, Andrew! And it's what I've got to do!”
“There's not a doubt about it, Dawtie. You've got to love him, and you do love him!”
“But there's more than that, Andrew. To hear the laird talk you would think he cared more for the Bible than for the whole world—not to say gold cups. ”

“ How would the world advance but for the men who have to make their fortunes! If a man find his father has not made money for him, what is he to do but make it for himself? You would not have me all my life a clerk! If I had but known, I should by this time have been well ahead!”
Alexa had nothing to answer; it all sounded very reasonable! Were not Scots boys everywhere taught it was the business of life to rise? ”

“ Those only whose self is aware of a higher presence can escape becoming bores and disgusts to themselves. That every man is endlessly greater than what he calls himself, must seem a paradox to the ignorant and dull, but a universe would be impossible without it. George had not arrived at the discovery of this fact, and yet was for the present contented both with himself and with his circumstances. ”

“ It is because we are selfish, with that worst selfishness which is incapable of recognizing itself, not to say its own loathsomeness, that we have to be made ill. That they may leave the last remnants of their selfishness, are the saints themselves over-taken by age and death. Suffering does not cause the vile thing in us—that was there all the time; it comes to develop in us the knowledge of its presence, that it may be war to the knife between us and it. It was no wonder that Dawtie grew more and more of a favorite at Potlurg. ”

“ If a man worships God, he loves Him so that no love can come between him and God; if the earth were removed, and the mountains cast into the midst of the sea, it would be all one to him, for God would be all the same. Is it not so, sir?”
“You are a good girl, Dawtie, and I approve of every word you say. It would more than savor of presumption to profess that I loved God up to the point you speak of; but I deserve to love Him. ”

“ Andrew laughed.
“I flatter myself I have not ceased to be practical, Mr. Crawford. You are busy with what you see, and I am busy as well with what I don't see; but all the time I believe my farm is in as good a state as your books.”
George gave a start, and stole a look at the young farmer, but was satisfied he “meant nothing.” The self-seeker will walk into the very abyss protesting himself a practical man, and counting him unpractical who will not with him “jump the life to come.” Himself, he neither measures the width nor questions his muscle. ”

“ Happy they whom it bears inward to the center of things! Alas, for those whom it carries outward to “the flaming walls of creation!” The poor old laird who, with all his refinement, all his education, all his interest in philology, prosody, history, and reliquial humanity, had become the slave of a goblet, had left it behind him, had faced the empty universe empty-handed, and vanished with a shadow-goblet in his heart; the eyes that gloated over the gems had gone to help the grass to grow. ”