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According to one American reader, fans raved about George MacDonald's novels as if they were "a new gospel." A huge public, she insisted, was "greedy" for more. It was not MacDonald's gospel that was new, however, but his fresh presentation of the gospel's relevance to life. MacDonald had once said, "The life, thoughts, deeds, aims, beliefs of Jesus have to be fresh expounded every age, for all the depth of eternity lies in them, and they have to be seen into more profoundly every new era of the world's spiritual history." Through his writing, he had found a way to do just that.

"Life and religion are one, or neither is anything," he insisted. Incensed by seeing professing Christians intellectually assent to Christian doctrine while still adhering to secular attitudes and patterns of life, he dedicated his ministry to demonstrating that Christian truth is at the very heart of life. Life itself is constantly trying to teach that unity. "The same God who is in us … also is all about us—inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word," he remarked, "and the two are ever trying to meet in us." That is, every aspect of the created universe and of human experience comes from God. Rightly received, all of life is a vehicle of grace.

Stories, MacDonald discovered, are an ideal means for showing people the sacramental character of life. A prolific writer, he composed poetry, novels, and fairy tales for both children and adults, as well as sermons, essays, and works of literary criticism—over 50 books in all. A shrewd and discerning student of his own life's experiences, both those of joy and those of grief, he portrayed the truths he discovered in his large gallery of characters. He was careful to teach nothing that his own life did not exemplify.

MacDonald's popularity in his own century was based largely upon his novels, and such titles as Sir Gibbie, Robert Falconer, and Thomas Wingfold, Curate remain highly readable today to all who are interested in the wedding of Christian truth to human experience. It is in the mythic reaches of his fairy tales, however, that his literary reputation largely endures. They stand not only in their own right but as the forerunners of many such writings by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L'Engle.

Chesterton and Lewis, perhaps the two most influential Christian writers of the 20th century, both hailed him as pivotal in shaping their thought. Chesterton dubbed him "St. Francis of Aberdeen" and said that MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, which had been read to him in the nursery, was a book that "made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start." Lewis saluted MacDonald as his "master," affirming that he had never written a book that did not bear the stamp of MacDonald's influence. What most affected Lewis was MacDonald's portrayal of "holiness": "The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live."

George MacDonald's discernment of the "real universe" began in his childhood. He was born in 1824 in Huntly, a town in the north of Scotland whose inhabitants held to a stern and unwavering form of Calvinism. His deep need for love was frustrated by the death of his mother from tuberculosis when he was eight. His Calvinist father, who was both a stern disciplinarian and an understanding, loving parent, undertook to be both father and mother to his family of boys.

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