In early non-Catholic days one of the men to whom I gave a boy’s devotion was George MacDonald, poet, novelist, preacher, the centenary of whose birth falls to be observed this year. Occasionally he was a guest at our house; at other times I heard him lecture in different parts of London or met him in the home of a neighbour whom he sometimes visited. His books were devoured with the uncritical voracity of the youthful hero-worshipper. It was with special interest, therefore, that I turned to the biography which his son has just published.

Mr. Chesterton, in the introduction which he supplies, contrasts George MacDonald with Carlyle. The latter, he says, never lost the Puritan mood even when he lost the whole of the Puritan theology. So far, however, in Mr. Chesterton’s estimation, did MacDonald escape the Calvinism of his early surroundings that he says of him ‘in his particular type of literary work he did indeed realise the apparent paradox of a St. Francis of Aberdeen, seeing the same sort of halo round every flower and bird. It is not the same thing (he continues) as any poet’s appreciation of the beauty of the flower or bird. A heathen can feel that and remain a heathen, or in other words, remain sad. It is a certain special sense of significance, which the tradition that most values it calls sacramental. To have got back to it or forward to it, at one bound of boyhood, out of the black Sabbath of a Calvinist town, was a miracle of imagination.’