Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84Plough Quarterly • Autumn 2016 77 anyone in the world, and among the dozens of books he read to me and my siblings were MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie. My grandparents’ house was full of books, but it was obvious even to a child that George MacDonald meant something special to him. At a time when most of Mac­ Donald’s books were out of print and difficult to find, Grandpa would spend long weekend afternoons combing the catalogs of secondhand booksellers for titles he hadn’t read. The books, when they came, were generally in poor condition. He mended and rebound them with loving precision, letting us help paint on the stiff bindery glue and select ribbons to bind in as markers. Into the back of each book he pasted a glossary of Scottish terms, and in the front he placed a photo- copied overview of MacDonald’s life along with a list of his works. The list was annotated in Grandpa’s decisive handwriting to save future readers from wasting time on titles he considered inferior. There are marks of A plus for his favorites (Robert Falconer, Sir Gibbie, Warlock o’ Glenwarlock). Lilith, which he could never see the point of, rates a D minus. Like many people who love MacDonald’s writings, Grandpa made collections of extracts. It was from one of these – ninety-one short selections manually typed on a vintage Smith Corona and bound into a little volume he gave my father for his birthday – that I first discovered, at a time when I badly needed it, MacDonald’s great-hearted, practical, but uncompromising account of the New Testa- ment message. I read that collection numerous times before I read MacDonald’s novels for myself, and, although I have since read almost all his published work, I still return to that little book for inspiration and reflection. . . . That George MacDonald is known at all today is likely due to the influence his writings had on two of the twentieth century’s most important Christian apologists, G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. Both men gladly acknowledged their debt to him, and both were eager that he should be more widely read. Chesterton wrote, “When he comes to be more carefully studied as a mystic, as I think he will be when people discover the possibility of collecting jewels scattered in a rather irregular setting, it will be found, I fancy, that he stands for a rather important turning point in the history of Christendom.” 5 For both men, MacDonald’s imaginative stories first provided a new view of the world: Chesterton described The Princess and the Goblin as “a book that has made a difference to my whole existence,” 6 while C. S. Lewis said that after reading Phan- tastes as a young atheist, “I knew that I had crossed a great frontier.” 7 Lewis went on to explain this when he looked back later in life: The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, “A little more of God will make up for a good deal less of you.” George MacDonald