Donal Grant by George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

Nothing but Christ himself for your very own teacher and friend and brother, not all the doctrines about him, even if every one of them were true, can save you. (Location 3238)

All hatred of sin is love to the sinner. (Location 3247)

The horrible thing is being bad, and all punishment is help to deliver us from that, nor will punishment cease till we have ceased to be bad. God will have us good, and Jesus works out the will of his father. (Location 3248)

She was not yet free of the notion that you must be able to argue in defence of your convictions. She was unable to say she believed a thing so long as anyone was able to bring up an argument against it, which she could not show to be false. Alas for our beliefs if they go no farther than the poor horizon of our experience or our logic, or any possible wording of the beliefs themselves! (Location 4424)

“If you give a true enough and large enough meaning to the word salvation, I answer you at once, nothing. Exactly in proportion as a man is saved, will he do the work of God’s world aright—the whole design of it being this—to rear a beautiful holy family. The world is God’s nursery for his upper rooms—for a higher and nobler state of being—a state which can be developed only by the doing of the will of God. (Location 4752)

It is wonderful how small a physical elevation, lifting us into a thinner air, but how little thinner, serves to raise the human spirits! We are like barometers, only work the other way—the higher we go, the higher rises our mercury. (Location 4967)

That was the way they of the circumcision worried St. Paul, only he was able to bear, and able to defend himself from their doctrine! When the very hope of the creature in his creator is attacked in the name of religion, when his longing after a living God is met with the offer of a paltry escape from hell, how is the creature to live? It is God we want, not heaven! True righteousness, not an imputed one! Remission, not mere letting off! Love, not mere endurance. (Location 4979)

“I feel,” he added as his eyes strayed about the room as if in search of a suggestion, “almost as if I were trying to understand a human creature. A house is so like a human mind, which gradually disentangles and explains itself as you go on to know it! It is no accidental resemblance, for, as an unavoidable necessity, every house must be like those that built it. In all houses there are places we know nothing about yet, just as in our own selves.” (Location 5076)

He attributes all his discomfort in life to the fact that things outside him are not such as he would have them, when in fact his refusal to see himself as he really is constitutes the most ineradicable symptom of the disease. (Location 5591)

For God alone is, and without him we are not. (Location 5595)

If the world had been so made that men could believe in the maker of it without any trouble, it would not have been a world worth living in, neither would the God that made such a world, and so revealed himself to such people, be worth believing in. God alone knows what life is enough for us to live, and what life is worth his while and that we shall find worth ours. We may be sure he is labouring to make it as full, lovely, grand, and the best in beauty as it is possible for him to make it—only that depends on how much we make it possible by believing in what he is and letting him have his way with us. If we do not trust him, will not work with him, and are always thwarting his endeavours to make us alive, then we must be miserable—there is no help for it. (Location 5745)

Love is God’s being. Love is his creative energy—they are one. God’s punishments are for the casting out of the sin that uncreates, for the recreating of the things his love made and sin has unmade. (Location 5912)

A presentiment is not a command. A prophecy may fail of the least indication of duty. The presentiment may be true, may be from God himself, yet involve no reason why a man should change his way, or turn aside from the path before him. St. Paul received warning after warning on his way to Jerusalem that bonds and imprisonment awaited him, and these warnings came from the spirit of prophecy, but he would not heed them. He knew better than imagine duty to be determined by consequences. There is a better guide, and he followed that. So did Donal now. Moved to go back, he did not go back, nor afterwards did he repent it. (Location 6522)

There is no certainty as to how deep any teaching may have gone until a youth is left by himself and has to choose and refuse companions. (Location 7536)