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"'I seldom go to church,' said Falconer; 'but when I do, I come here: and always feel that I am in the presence of one of the holy servants of God's great temple not made with hands. I heartily trust that man. He is what he seems to be.'" This description of the preacher in David Elginbrod is George MacDonald's tribute to his friend and mentor F. D. Maurice, arguably the most important Anglican theologian of the 19th century.

MacDonald was present at Maurice's inaugural address at the Manchester Working Men's College, and one of his first jobs after leaving Arundel was as a lecturer there. Maurice read Phantastes in manuscript and helped MacDonald to find a publisher. In 1865, after their move to London, the MacDonalds started attending St. Peter's church in Vere Street, where Maurice was the rector, and as a result of his influence eventually became members of the Church of England.

Maurice had not been brought up in the Anglican Church. In fact, he had been born and raised a Unitarian and for a time in adolescence had been strongly influenced by his mother's growing Calvinism. Perhaps partly because of the painful religious division within his own family, he longed for a truth that transcended human-made systems. He wrote later, "The desire for Unity has haunted me all my life through."

The book for which he is most remembered, The Kingdom of Christ (1838), combines an extreme theological openness with an exalted view of the church. Nearly every denomination or Christian group has some of the truth, he argued, but no one should confuse his own theological perspective with the whole truth. Christians are united in Christ, not in certain ideas about Christ.

For Maurice, the church is a "universal spiritual society." The two qualities are co-dependent. It can only be universal if it is spiritual (an inner reality as well as an outer organization). But it can only be spiritual if it is universal. Maurice believed that openness is at the heart of the New Testament. Everyone belongs to the church, without exclusion. The problem is, some people believe it and some people do not—yet. Salvation involves turning away from the sin of self-centered independence and acknowledging one's redemption in Christ, the King and Head of all humanity.

"The Church is, therefore, human society in its normal state," he wrote; "the world, that same society irregular and abnormal. The world is the Church without God: the Church is the world restored to its relation with God, taken back by Him into the state for which He created it."

Maurice did not approve of "gathered" churches—groups of people holding precisely the same beliefs. He supported the Church of England as "the Church in England"—a body of Christians of diverse beliefs bound only by the fact that they were neighbors and members of the same community.

His model for the church is not a group who agree, but a family—whose members are bound by deeper ties than verbal formulas. The Patriarchs of Genesis were first and foremost relatives. The story of Jacob, argued Maurice, showed that God's people were founded on family relationship and not choice. The Bible, instead of being a digest of doctrine to be picked apart by theologians, is God's letter explaining to the family of Christ their own position.

Maurice was later one of the founders of the Christian Socialist Movement. This was not so much conventional socialism as it was an attempt to offer a Christian critique of social injustices. (Though its 19th-century influence was limited, Tony Blair, now Britain's longest-serving Prime Minister, has recently described himself as belonging to the "Christian Socialist tradition.") Maurice's political ideas sprang directly from his understanding of the church. His concern for poverty and its accompanying educational deprivation was not an extension of the old idea of "charity," but a principle of social theology. A universal spiritual society ultimately implied a redistribution of wealth. His work as the first principal of the London Working Men's College was fundamental to his Christian Socialism—an expression of his vision of man as a whole being. Social justice meant nothing without education.

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