Paul Faber: Surgeon, Chapters 10 - 16

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 pastor was making, thereby implying their serious deficiencies, lowered his salary to the point where he was forced to resign and go elsewhere. And Drake’s inner struggles may well give some insight into MacDonald’s own when he as a young pastor. Walter Drake in his forced retirement is spiritually passing through what Bunyan referred to as the valley of humiliation, and MacDonald is showing the inner benefit of the experience. Much is suggested about MacDonald’s own thinking by his remarking that Drake “grew humbler before the Master, and the Master began to lord it lovingly over him. . . [he began] to pore and ponder over the living tale of the New Covenant; began to feel that the Lord meant what He said . . . forgot Calvin a good deal, outgrew the influences of Jonathan Edwards, and began to understand Jesus Christ.”

 WHEREIN IS DRAKE FALLING SHORT IN HIS ATTITUDES? WHAT SPIRITUAL LESSON IS HE IN THE THROES OF LEARNING? 

     Faber, visiting Juliet, is dismayed to discover she has been bleeding all night and is near death. Desperately, he opens his own vein and manages to transfuse some of his own blood into her, thus saving her life. Faithfully visiting her during a long period of recuperation, he falls more deeply in love with her. Faber’s conduct seems completely altruistic and admirable, yet the attitudes it generates within him depict vividly the distinctions between Christian and non-Christian altruism. Meanwhile Wingfold and his wife visit the Bevis’s, and Bevis proposes his building a chapel on his land. Desperate for money, Juliet asks Mrs. Peckridge to sell a valuable ring she possesses; unbeknown to Juliet, Faber takes it and returns, giving the lady fifty pounds of his own money. Deeply pleased, Juliet offers to pay Faber what she owes him, but he refuses to take any money. In one of Faber’s visits, they discuss Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, which Faber thinks “weak and exaggerated,” and utterly rejects the hope it expresses, while Juliet sees it as “the most beautiful poem I have ever read.” Their respective reactions show each’s attitude toward the Christian faith.

     Tennyson’ poem is a famous one; he penned it upon the untimely death of a dear friend. It begins: 

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, / Whom we, that have not seen thy face, / By faith, and faith alone, embrace, / Believing where we cannot prove; 

 Thine are these orbs of light and shade,/ Thou madest Life in man and brute, / Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot / Is on the skull which thou hast made. 

 Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: / Thou madest man, he knows not why, / He thinks he was not made to die; / And thou hast made him: thou art just. 

 Thou seemest human and divine, / The highest, holiest manhood , thou: / Our wills are ours, we know not how; / Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

 And so on, as through literally hundreds of lines he wrestles with his faith as he contemplates many of the enigmas of life. The poem ends: 

 That friend of mine who lives in God / That God, which ever lives and loves, / One God, one law, one element, / And one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves. 

 In many of the passages that MacDonald writes, such as the extended interaction between Faber and Juliet in this week’s reading, or his description of Drake’s agonizing over his poverty, we can feel he also is thinking out of his own experiences as he is going through an especially difficult time in his life. He is desperately in need of money to enable him and his two daughters to join his wife and the remainder of his family in Italy, where they fled in a final hope to slow the progress of the dread disease tuberculosis in their beloved daughter Mary. He is earnestly trying to maintain his own faith and trust as he writes. 

    When he has Juliet remark: “Surely the thing that ought to be, is the thing that must me,” he is expressing his own hope, a principle upon which much of his apologetic is based. C. S. Lewis picks up on this principle as well, as in his writings he expresses the fact that, since our deepest desires in this world are never satisfied, no matter what experiences we may have, we must be intended to prepare ourselves for a better world. Hence human restlessness. Augustine writes in his Confessions, speaking to God: “. . . you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” 

 WHAT ARE YOUR RESPONSES TO THESE CHAPTERS? WHAT THOUGHTS OR PERPLEXITIES DO THEY GIVE RISE TO? PLEASE SHARE THEM.