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 8478 Plough Quarterly • Autumn 2016 magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception. The deception is all the other way round – in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from “the land of righteousness.” As Lewis indicates, for MacDonald the ordinary events of each day – the “holy present,” as he called it – are messages to us direct from God. He was convinced that the kingdom of heaven can be a reality in the here and now, and that it requires daily acts of obedient discipleship to bring it about. As a character in his novel Thomas Wingfold puts it: “I begin to suspect . . . that the common transactions of life are the most sacred chan- nels for the spread of the heavenly leaven.” 8 This quote was one of several that my grandfather never tired of repeating. In May 2002 he was found to have advanced incur- able cancer. During his final summer, his appreciation for the joys of daily life remained vivid, but he never (that I know) questioned or regretted that his time on earth was ending. During those months he referred us to a passage from one of MacDonald’s A-plus titles, What’s Mine’s Mine, that could have been written about him: “I do care to live – tremendously, but I don’t mind where. He who made this room so well worth living in, may surely be trusted with the next!” Love of life and an uncom- plicated trust in its Author: these are the gifts George Mac- Donald offers his readers. In an age when the daily news seems increasingly complex and terrible, it is high time for many more to discover with him the joy and promise of simple discipleship. As he wrote to a friend near the end of his life: “Then hail to the world with all its summers and snow, all its delight and its aching, all its jubilance and its old age. We shall come out of it the sons and daughters of life, of God himself the only Father.”  1. English Celebrities of the Nineteenth Century (London: Hughes and Edmonds, 1876). 2. C.S. Lewis, preface to George MacDonald: An Anthol- ogy, ed. C. S. Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946). 3. C. S. Lewis to Edith Gates, May 23, 1944, in The Col- lected Letters of C.S. Lewis, vol. 2, ed. Walter Hooper (Harper Collins, 2004), 616. 4. C. S. Lewis, preface. 5. G. K. Chesterton, introduction to George MacDonald and his Wife (London: Allen & Unwin, 1924), 13. 6. Ibid. 7. C. S. Lewis, preface. 8. George MacDonald, Thomas Wingfold, Curate (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1876). “If you do not obey Him, you will not know Him. . . . Obedience to Christ is Christianity. Let me die insisting upon it. For my Lord insists upon it.” George MacDonald