Therefore, I invite you to gaze back in time through the “northern windows” of these volumes. Picture yourself perhaps near the cheerful hearth described in the opening pages of What’s Mine’s Mine, looking out the window to the cold seas and mountains in the distance, where perhaps you get a fleeting glimpse of highlanders Ian and Alister Macruadh.

Or imagine yourself walking up Duke Street in Huntly from MacDonald’s birth home, following in the footsteps of fictional Robert Falconer to the town square.

Or envision yourself on some windswept highland moor with Gibbie or Cosmo Warlock.

Or walk up the circular staircase of Fyvie Castle to Donal Grant’s tiny tower hideaway where he began to unravel the mysteries of that ancient and spooky place.

Or walk from Cullen’s Seatown alongside Malcolm selling the fish in his creel, turning at the Market Cross into Grant Street and continuing past Miss Horn’s house and up the hill to the entrance of the Cullen House grounds.

Or perhaps climb Castle Hill to the George MacDonald memorial bench and gaze across the sweep of Cullen Bay to Scarnose as Malcolm’s story comes to life before your eyes.

From any of these settings, whether real or imaginary, drift back through the years and gaze through the panoramic windows of these stories, and take in with pleasure the drama, relationships, images, characters, settings, and spiritual truths George MacDonald offers us as we are drawn into his world.

Michael Phillips

Cullen, Morayshire

Scotland, 2017

INTRODUCTION

A Heart of Ministry

A significant reason for the timelessness of George MacDonald’s writings is that he kept himself from using his pen to inveigh on the multitude of transitory issues that plagued society in his day. MacDonald was a thinking man, widely read, socially conscious, with strong views. Yet he resisted the temptation—if indeed it was such—to sway public opinion, or to use his influence to right the world’s transitory wrongs. His focus was always man’s response to the eternal not the temporal, on the character of God, on personal growth, on what being a follower of Christ means practically in daily relationships, responses, and choices. *

His focus on eternal themes thus retain their relevance, and keep his message vibrant and alive generation after generation, ever to be discovered anew by individual men and women. Meanwhile, the passing issues of 1860s Scotland or 1880s England, or 1900 America…industry, world wars, depressions, politics…as time raced on into the twentieth-century…these all rose and fell on the tides of time. Poverty, slums, war, and disease are still with us. Yet individuals are still being called out of the world to live in the higher air of Fatherhood. MacDonald’s eternal message lives on, as vital and transformational today as it was in 1870. His vision never lost its clarity in pointing the men and women of God’s creation toward life’s true first causes.

It is not that MacDonald didn’t care about the issues of his day. He simply realized where the precision and insight of his writing could do the most eternal good in men’s hearts—turning individuals toward their heavenly Father rather than attempting to right the world’s wrongs.