"C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology" (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they
flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery,
the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, and the passionate
love of hard-won learning. His best characters are those which reveal how
much real charity and spiritual wisdom can coexist with the profession of a
theology that seems to encourage neither. His own grandmother, a truly
terrible old woman wo had burnt his uncle's fiddle as a Satanic snare, might
well have appeared to him as what is now (inaccurately) called "a mere
sadist." Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert Falconer
and again in What's Mine's Mine, we are compelled to look deeper-to see,
inside the repellent crust, something that we can wholeheartedly pity and
even, with reservations, respect. In this way MacDonald illustrates, not the
doubtful maxim that to know all is to forgive all, but the unshakeable truth
that to forgive is to know. He who loves, sees.
He was born in 1824 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire and entered King's
College at Aberdeen in 1840. In 1842 he spent some months in the North of
Scotland cataloguing the library of a great house which has never been
identified. I mention the fact because it made a lifelong impression on
MacDonald. The image of a great house seen principally from the library and
always through the eyes of a stranger or a dependent (even Mr. Vane in
Lilith never seems at home in the library which is called his) haunts his
books to the end. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the "great
house in the North" was the scene of some important crisis or development in
his life. Perhaps it was here that he first came under the influence of
German Romanticism.
In 1850 he received what is technically known as a "Call" to become the
Minister of a dissenting chapel in Arundel. By 1852 he was in trouble with
the "deacons" for heresy, the charges being that he had expressed belief in
a future state of probation for heathens and that he was tainted with German
theology. The deacons took a roundabout method to be rid of him, by lowering
his salary-it had been Ј150 a year and he was now married-in the hope that
this would induce him to resign. But they had misjudged their man. MacDonald
merely replied that this was bad enough news for him but that he supposed he
must try to live on less. And for some time he continued to do so, often
helped by the offerings of his poorest parishioners who did not share the
views of the more prosperous Deacons. In 1853, however, the situation became
impossible. He resigned and embarked on the career of lecturing, tutoring,
occasional preaching, writing, and "odd jobs" which was his lot almost to
the end. He died in 1905.
His lungs were diseased and his poverty was very great. Literal
starvation was sometimes averted only by those last moment deliverances
which agnostics attribute to chance and Christians to Providence. It is
against this background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that some
of the following extracts can be most profitably read. His resolute
condemnations of anxiety come from one who has a right to speak; nor does
their tone encourage the theory that they owe anything to the pathological
wishful thinking-the spes phthisica-of the consumptive. None of the evidence
suggests such a character. His peace of mind came not from building on the
future but from resting in what he called "the holy Present." His
resignation to poverty (see Number 274) was at the opposite pole from that