Yet occasionally MacDonald spoke to the world’s pains he saw around him. It fell to one of his lesser-known novels, Weighed and Wanting, to manifest more fully than most of his other works one of the strongest driving forces in MacDonald’s spiritual vision—the theme of godly service to the poor, working compatibly with his recognition of the deeper need of the human soul to address its sin. MacDonald stresses the necessity for Christian charity and sacrifice in a number of books, notably The Vicar’s Daughter, Robert Falconer, and Sir Gibbie, and infuses nearly everything he wrote with the imperative of actively living one’s faith. However, in Weighed and Wanting, such ministry becomes a dominant theme as the story progresses, alongside the equally prominent theme of sin. MacDonald thus achieves an extraordinary marriage between the social and salvationary halves of the gospel.

In Weighed and Wanting, MacDonald explores societal conditions and the plight of the poor more directly than is his normal custom, bringing into wonderful harmony the temporal and the eternal. He gives us here a vision of ministry to the poor, suffering, diseased, and dying—a ministry imbued with the power of eternal Fatherhood. It is a balance few social reformers and few preachers through the centuries have been able to grasp, as the pendulum of “ministry” swings to the extremes but rarely finds the calm and quiet center.

It is in that center (spiritual and temporal fusing in unity) where Jesus lived and which MacDonald articulated in his writings. I know of nowhere else outside the gospel itself, other than in the writings of George MacDonald, where the balance between love for God and care for one’s neighbor is so profoundly illuminated. And though many consider Weighed and Wanting one of his minor works, it stands almost at the apex with one or two others in revealing, in a sense, this societal or social component of MacDonald’s overall vision of life.

Indeed, it was a vision he lived. The principles and methods and priorities we read about here emerged out of the MacDonald’s own lifestyle. Wherever they happened to be, with eleven children, he and Louisa always opened their home, not to every waif and stray and beggar of the city or they would have been inundated, but to those in need whom God brought them. They took in unofficial “foster” children and adults, and even, the very year this book was written, “adopted” (probably also unofficially, though the family used that word) two girls whose mother was dying of tuberculosis (whom they also cared for until her death). After moving to Italy, with their own brood gradually shrinking, their huge home in Bordighera was nevertheless nearly always full. ¹ Perhaps this fact in some measure helps explain why they always seemed financially strapped.

MacDonald’s was the practical perspective, not of attempting to change the whole world, but only his little corner of it. We can all be deeply thankful that he kept his focus on the essential bull’s eye of God’s Fatherhood. In so doing, living as he did, through his writings he changed the world as well.