Not only does MacDonald continually emphasize that belief must come from within, that no one will be persuaded by intellectual argument that Christianity is true (thus placing “proofs” in their proper perspective), he lays the same foundation for doctrine and theology. It is fruitless to argue and contend about points of doctrine. Speaking of Wingfold, he gives us a window into his own perspective when confronted with controversy and accusations of heterodoxy. Even when making the controversial statement that God did not originally ordain the sacrifice (a point he makes forcefully in his sermon, “The Consuming Fire”) he will not proclaim it from the pulpit nor defend his view by argument. He knew neither argument nor attempted persuasion was of any use. Those hungering for God’s deep truths would find them. When that hunger brought them to him, only then would he speak.

When the Lord is known as the heart of every joy, as well as the refuge from every sorrow, then the altar will be known for what it is—an ecclesiastical antique. The Father permitted but never ordained sacrifice. In tenderness to his children he ordered the ways of their unbelieving belief.

So at least thought and said Wingfold, and if he did not say so in the pulpit, it was not lest his fellows should regard him as a traitor, but because so few of his people would understand. He would spend no strength in trying to shore up the church—he sent his life-blood through its veins, and his appeal to the Living One, for whose judgment he waited.

The most memorable focal point of the book for me, which I have quoted numerous times throughout the years, is the emphasis MacDonald drives home more forcefully here than I have encountered elsewhere in his novels—that belief is not in itself enough. Everything, he says in a variety of ways, depends on the kind of God we believe in. *

When Barbara asks Wingfold if he thought it wicked for a man not to believe in God, Wingfold replies, “That depends on the sort of God he fancied himself asked to believe in.” Then in a passage of huge insight, MacDonald comments on Richard’s unbelief:

From an early age Richard had been accustomed to despise the form he called God which stood in the gallery of his imagination, carved at by the hands of successive generations of sculptors—some hard, some feeble, some clever, some stupid, all conventional and without prophetic imagination. His antagonism had long taken the shape of an angry hostility to the notion of any God whatever. . .

Into the workshop of Richard’s mind was now introduced. . .a new idea of divinity. . .the idea, namely, of a being to call God, who was a delight to think of. . .The one door to admit this formal notion was hard to open. . .The human niche where the idea of a God must stand, was in Richard’s house occupied by the most hideous falsity. . .