The “Idylls of the King” are a kind of “Pilgrim’s Progress.”  In various ways they trace, and with matchless music rehearse, the growth of souls and their victories over spiritual enemies.  One of the most pathetic stories ever told is that of the beautiful Queen Guinevere, who by shame and agony learned that “we needs must love the highest when we see it;” and who never appreciated the great love in which she was enfolded until Arthur, “moving ghost-like to his doom,” had gone to fight his last great battle in the west.

The world owes George MacDonald gratitude it will never repay;—­such spiritual souls are never paid in the coin of this world.  In “Robert Falconer,” he taught his time with a lucidity and sweetness that none but Tennyson and Browning have equaled, and that not even they have surpassed, that a “loving worm within its clod were lovelier than a loveless God upon his Throne,” and in “Thomas Wingfold” he has traced with epic fidelity the growth of a soul from moral insensibility to manly strength and vision.  The description of the process by which Wingfold is brought to see that he, a teacher in the church, is a fraud and a hypocrite, and by which he is then lifted up and made worthy of his vocation as a minister of the glorious Gospel of the blessed God is a wonderful piece of spiritual delineation.

With Guinevere the external humiliation was an essential stage in her soul’s development; but with Wingfold there was no public disgrace,—­only the not less poignant shame of a man who, looking into his own heart, finds nothing but selfishness and duplicity.  His condition was a matter between himself, his friend, and his God; but none the less the humiliation was the means by which his soul’s eyes were opened and his heart fired with a passion for reality.

One result of the soul’s re-awakening is the realization that it has relations to God and that they are at once the nearest, the most vital, and the most enduring of all its relations.  Before, it had felt the call of duty and had recognized that it had affinities with truth and right; but now it has come into the consciousness of sonship.  God is not distant and unrelated, but near and personally helpful.  In a very real sense He is Father.  He is interested in the welfare of His children; and His will has now become the law of their lives.  The first awakening is to the consciousness of a moral order and of freedom; the second awakening is to the consciousness of God and of a near and vital relation with Him.  The path of progress is still full of obstacles; there are still attractions for the senses in animalism and solicitations from something malign outside; but never again will the soul be without the realization that it is in the hands of a compassionate, as well as a just, God.  I am inclined to think that the elder Calvinists were right in their contention that when the soul has once come to this saving knowledge of God it can never again “fall from grace,”