SOURCE: “Showing the Unshowable,” in The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Vision of George MacDonald, Christian University Press, 1982, pp. 148-55.

In the following essay, Hein summarizes MacDonald's literary and religious beliefs as they appear in his fiction and nonfiction.

“Law is the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed; and you may, if you will, call Imagination the tailor that cuts her garments to fit her. …”

—Preface to the 1893 American edition of The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales

Today, many who think about the relation of Christianity to art discern an incompatibility between them. They see art, by its very nature, as having to be free and unconstrained by dogma, and Christianity as arbitrary and confining. Such people would be quick to see MacDonald as a man torn between two worlds. Having failed as a minister in...