There and Back - George Macdonald - Bog

Excerpt: ...God knows-God does know. I think he will make his very life a terrible burden, so that for pure misery he will cry to him. But suppose he was a man who tried to do right, who tried to help his neighbour, who was at least so far a good man as to deny the God that most people seem to believe in-what would you say then? I would say, 'Have patience.' If there be a good God, he cannot be altogether dissatisfied with such a man. Of course it is something wanting that makes him like that, and it may be he is to blame, or it may be he can't help it: I do not know when any man has arrived at the point of development at which he is capable of believing in God: the child of a savage may be capable, and a gray-haired man of science incapable. If such a man says, 'The question of a God is not interesting to me, ' I believe him; but, if he be such a man as you have last described, I believe also that, as God is taking care of him who is the God of patience, the time must come when something will make him want to know whether there be a God, and whether he cannot get near him, so as to be near him.' I would say, 'He is in God's school; don't be too much troubled about him, as if God might overlook and forget him. He will see to all that concerns him. He has made him, and he loves him, and he is doing and will do his very best for him.' Oh, I am so glad to hear you speak like that cried Barbara. I didn't know clergymen were like that I'm sure they don't talk like that in the pulpit Well, you know a man can't just chat with his people in the pulpit as he may when he has one alone to himself For, you see, there are hundreds there, and they are all very different, and that must make a difference in the way he can talk to them. There are multitudes who could not understand a word of what we have been saying to each, other But if a clergyman says anything in the pulpit that differs in essence from what he says out of it, he is a false prophet, and has...