Growing With My Garden

Our reading for this week begins with a lengthy description of Rev.Walter Drake, a retired minister of dissenting congregations. In England, the state church is Anglo-Catholic, and its members enjoy the higher social standing, but there are several protestant churches–Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, etc.–all of which were referred to with a certain social snobbery as “dissenters.” Drake is a dissenter, as was MacDonald, until he joined the Church of England in 1866. In his description and evaluation MacDonald speaks from his own experience. He began his career in the early 1850's as a minister of a Congregational Church in Arundel, a coastal town in southern England. His experience there was an unhappy one.       Also, MacDonald may well be drawing upon his own pastoral experiences when he presents and the effect of Wingfold’s sermons on his congregation. The Arundel congregation, so disturbed by the emphasis upon obedience to Christ’s commands that their pasto

In his novels George MacDonald is primarily concerned with leading his readers into a knowledge of the true nature of God and how he works in the lives of individual people.  He saw in his day an increasing neglect in the general public of these subjects, and he felt deeply that a proper understanding of, and a right response to, these issues was of vital importance for each reader, both for time and eternity.  In his day–long before the cinema and television–the novel was a widespread source of entertainment and, having a love of and a gift for telling stories, he strove to use it as a means of expressing these concerns and propagating his understanding of them.  Thus in Paul Faber: Surgeon, we have an array of personality types and our minds are focused on how God is working in the lives of each.  Various passages in our novel may seem like sermonizing, but they are among the most insightful that he wrote in his long career and extremely helpful in bringing us into a fuller under

George MacDonald was writing this novel during the mid 1870's, an especially difficult period in his life.   Their second daughter Mary, beautiful and vivacious, now in her mid 20's, was suffering from tuberculosis and steadily declining in health.  Desperate to do all they could to save her, the family determined to take her to the Mediterranean area in the hope that such a change climate would stem the progress of the disease; however, raising the necessary money to do so was a forbidding challenge. The family was finally able to put together enough to afford Louisa’s taking Mary and some of the family to southern Italy while MacDonald and two of his other daughters remained  at the Retreat, their home on the Thames in a suburb of London.  Struggling with ill health himself, he was writing Paul Faber: Surgeon, a sequel to the recently published Thomas Wingfold: Curate, in the hopes that the selling of it would yield them sufficient funds so that he and the remainder of th

Paul Faber: Surgeon (1778), is a sequel to Thomas Wingfold: Curate.  In both novels MacDonald focuses upon each character’s spiritual state in their relationship to God, and how they grow or deteriorate as they respond to the sacramental energies of life. In the former novel MacDonald created George Bascombe, who epitomized the naturalist/materialist spirit that was rising during the Victorian age.  In Paul Faber, he thoroughly delineates such attitudes and strives to show their utter inadequacy as compared to the truths of Christianity. We will divide the novel into the following weekly segments and post a blog for each.  We warmly invite your responses and reactions to the novel.  Please feel free to express whatever is on your mind.  Much of the value of our reading together lies in our freely expressing our thoughts and interacting with one another. June 20: Chapters 1 - 9 27: 10 - 16 July 4: 17 - 23 11: 24 - 29 18: 30 - 40 25: 41 - 47 August 1: 48 - end.