2 quotations linked to Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III. by or associated with George MacDonald, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Hope, moral growth, love, justice, self-examination, purpose, obedience and MacDonald’s theology of divine goodness.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“the man who strives to be better”
The comparison values active moral improvement above craving public praise, locating greater life in the direction of one’s striving rather than external applause.
Unspoken Sermons; Project Gutenberg #9057. The short excerpt comes from a longer explicitly theological hierarchy of forms of life and must be read in that religious setting.
“there must be hope while there is existence”
MacDonald grounds hope in his theology of a continuously good God, making continued existence itself evidence, within his religious argument, that despair need not be final.
Unspoken Sermons, Series Two, ‘The Last Farthing,’ Project Gutenberg #9057. ‘There must be hope while there is existence’ occurs in MacDonald's explicitly Christian argument that where existence remains there must be God, whom he describes as forever good. It is nineteenth-century theology about divine goodness and ultimate restoration, not secular prognosis or clinical mental-health evidence.
