A couple of months ago, I wrote about novels of Christian experience, and more recently I asked whether The Brothers Karamazov was an example of this genre. Thomas Wingfold, curate is a novel that epitomises what I mean by the term.
Thomas Wingfold, curate, published in 1876, is the first novel in George MacDonald’s Wingfold trilogy .1 MacDonald’s writings don’t enjoy the popularity they once did. Writers as varied as Lewis Carroll, W. H. Auden, J. M. Barrie, Mark Twain, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Walter de la Mare have cited him as a major influence on their work, yet today he is largely unread. The reasons for this are not far to seek. The imaginative world into which MacDonald takes his readers is that of a passionate evangelical Christian.2 In this he differs sharply from his near contemporaries, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell and Charles Dickens, who expressed their faith in scathing depictions of Victorian society’s gross inequalities and the awful living conditions of the urban poor.
While Gaskell’s and Dickens’ reputations have risen as critics have recognised the social criticism in their novels, MacDonald’s has sunk as his brand of Christianity has become less and less a part of public life in the English-speaking world. Not that social criticism is absent from Thomas Wingfold, curate. MacDonald is critical of the Victorian Church of England, particularly of some of its upper middle class adherents (epitomised in the character of Mrs Ramshorn) and its clergy (Wingfold as he is at the start of the narrative), whom he sees as far from real Christian faith and failing to serve the church’s parishioners. The narrator says,
And there are those who, in their very first seeking of it, are nearer to the kingdom of heaven than many who have for years believed themselves of it.
In the former there is more of the mind of Jesus, and when he calls them they recognize him at once and go after him; while the others examine him from head to foot, and, finding him not sufficiently like the Jesus of their conception, turn their backs, and go to church, or chapel, or chamber, to kneel before a vague form mingled of tradition and fancy. But the first shall be last, and the last first; and there are from whom, be it penny or be it pound, what they have must be taken away. (2, 3)3
There is also gentle satire of the justice system and of the middle class’s sense of entitlement. But MacDonald’s evident purpose is to draw the reader into a lived, if fictional, example of faith and to defend that faith in the face of growing Victorian atheism, which he critiques so well.
The novel, set in a country town in Victorian England, effectively begins with an encounter between Wingfold, the curate of the town’s parish church, and George Bascombe. Bascombe, a convinced atheist, challenges Wingfold on his beliefs, and Wingfold soon admits to himself that he took holy orders as a matter of convenience and that he neither knows nor believes much of the Christian faith. Bascombe’s challenge has an effect opposite to what he intends, however. Wingfold may not have much faith, but he does have the integrity to recognise that he should either resign as a clergyman or find the faith that his office requires. His quest is strengthened when he receives a letter from Joseph Polwarth, a little man in a painful and dwarfish body, who issues a challenge of a different kind, namely that Wingfold should stop reading someone else’s sermons each Sunday and preach what he really believes. Polwarth is the gatekeeper of the big house, a self-educated man who has thought deeply about his faith and consciously and actively follows Jesus. He becomes Wingfold’s mentor in his journey towards faith.
Even before Wingfold and Polwarth first meet, Bascombe, out walking with his cousin Helen, briefly sees Polwarth and his niece and expresses the (social Darwinist) view that such people should not be allowed to live. The irony of this statement becomes larger and larger as the novel proceeds and Polwarth’s wonderfully transformative role in Wingfold’s life grows. Wingfold reads the Gospels and gradually grasps that Jesus gives us a window into the character of God, and is inviting him to become more Jesuslike and to place his faith in him.
I will not say too much more about the novel’s narrative, as this would spoil it for the reader. The other major character is Helen Lingard, niece of Mrs Ramshorn and cousin to Bascombe. For much of the novel Wingfold and Polwarth are ministering to Helen’s younger brother Leopold, a troubled soul who eventually finds God’s peace. Helen struggles emotionally. She feels addressed by Wingfold’s increasingly honest and passionate sermons, but she is contemptuous of his compassion as he gently attends to her brother. Her contempt is driven by her jealousy of Wingfold’s relationship with her beloved brother, by Bascombe’s emotionless atheism, and by how Wingfold’s growing faith challenges her unthinking middle-class attitudes. In the first chapter we are told that Bascombe was coming for dinner and “so was the curate, but he did not count for much” (1, 1). As the narrative proceeds, he comes to count for a great deal.
MacDonald presents his theological position in two ways. First, he is a very active narrator. His scathing denunciation of Bascombe is an example:
To him a man’s imagination was of no higher calling than to amuse him with its vagaries. He did not know, apparently, that Imagination had been the guide to all the physical discoveries which he worshipped, therefore could not reason that perhaps she might be able to carry a glimmering light even into the forest of the supersensible. (1, 7)
Second he has his characters talk about their beliefs. Quite early in the novel Polwarth makes a series of statements that encapsulate several intertwined themes. He asserts that the church’s task is not to defend the existence of God (as Bascombe wants Wingfold to believe) but to teach that God is revealed in Jesus (Anyone who has seen me has seen the father.” John 14:9). Wingfold’s task, he says, is to get to know Jesus through reading the New Testament so that Jesus can reveal the Father to him
“I repeat,” said Polwarth, “that the community whose servant you are was not founded to promulgate or defend the doctrine of the existence of a Deity, but to perpetuate the assertion of a man that he was the son and only revealer of the Father of men, a fact, if it be a fact, which precludes the question of the existence of a God, because it includes the answer to it. Your business, therefore, even as one who finds himself in your unfortunate position as a clergyman, is to make yourself acquainted with that man: he will be to you nobody save in revealing, through knowledge of his inmost heart, the Father to you. Take then your New Testament as if you had never seen it before, and read — to find out. (1, 19)
When Wingfold has an altercation with Bascombe in the middle of the novel, he was reached this conclusion for himself:
“No,” he said, “my business is not to prove to any other man that there is a God, but to find him for myself. If I should find him, then will be time enough to think of showing him.” (2, 10)
Jesus’ revelation, for MacDonald, is not simply a metaphorical dimension of reading: it is God’s activity in the would-be believer as he discovers the person of Jesus.
But when it came to the perplexity caused by some of the sayings of Jesus himself, it was another matter. He MUST understand these, he thought, or fail to understand the man. Here Polwarth told him that, if, after all, he seemed to fail, he must conclude that possibly the meaning of the words was beyond him, and that the understanding of them depended on a more advanced knowledge of Jesus himself; for, while words reveal the speaker, they must yet lie in the light of something already known of the speaker to be themselves intelligible. (1,30)
By the middle of the novel Wingfold realises that Jesus’ personality is growing in him:
. . . whereas in former times the name Christ had been to him little more than a dull theological symbol, the thought of him and of his thoughts was now constantly with him; ever and anon some fresh light would break from the cloudy halo that enwrapped his grandeur; ever was he growing more the Son of Man to his loving heart, ever more the Son of God to his aspiring spirit. Testimony had merged almost in vision: he saw into, and partly understood the perfection it presented: he looked upon the face of God and lived. Oftener and oftener, as the days passed, did it seem as if the man were by his side, and at times, in the stillness of the summer-eve, when he walked alone, it seemed almost, as thoughts of revealing arose in his heart, that the Master himself was teaching him in spoken words. (2, 33)
Anticipating this growth, in one of his sermons Wingfold says,
For Christianity does not mean what you think or what I think concerning Christ, but what IS OF Christ. My Christianity, if ever I come to have any, will be what of Christ is in me; your Christianity now is what of Christ is in you. (2, 3)
For MacDonald, coming to faith is not simply a matter of learning first, then doing. Much later, as Wingfold ministers to Leopold, the narrator comments about Wingfold,
For while his intellect was hanging about the door, asking questions, and uneasily shifting hither and thither in its unloved perplexities, the spirit of the master had gone by it unseen, and entered into the chamber of his heart. (3, 7)
Indeed, MacDonald has Wingfold following Jesus’ example by ministering to other people even when he is still uncertain what he believes. Wingfold makes this the theme of a blatantly honest sermon:
No, my hearers, I call not myself a Christian, but I call everyone here who obeys the word of Jesus, who restrains anger, who declines judgment, who practises generosity, who loves his enemies, who prays for his slanderers, to witness my vow, that I will henceforth try to obey him, in the hope that he whom he called God and his Father, will reveal to him whom you call your Lord Jesus Christ, that into my darkness I may receive the light of the world! (1, 31)
Much later, the narrator describes how Wingfold reaches a turning point in his life:
At the same time he saw plain enough that even if he gave his body to be burned,4 it were no sufficing assurance of his Christianity: nothing could satisfy him of that less than the conscious presence of the perfect charity. Without that he was still outside the kingdom, wandering in a dream around its walls. . . . . And he began to see the working of his doubts on the growth of his heart and soul — both widening and realizing his faith, and preventing it from becoming faith in an idea of God instead of in the living God — the God beyond as well as in the heart that thought and willed and imagined. (3, 7)
Wingfold grows in faith through his ministry, and late in the novel when Polwarth asks if Wingfold still thinks of giving up his curacy, he answers,
Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. No facts can take the place of truths, and if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and John and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. (3, 8)
When Bascombe challenges him for the last time, he responds,
“All I now say is, that in the story of Jesus I have beheld such grandeur — to me apparently altogether beyond the reach of human invention, such a radiation of divine loveliness and truth, such hope for man, soaring miles above every possible pitfall of Fate; and have at the same time, from the endeavour to obey the word recorded as his, experienced such a conscious enlargement of mental faculty, such a deepening of moral strength, such an enhancement of ideal, such an increase of faith, hope, and charity towards all men, that I now declare with the consent of my whole man — I cast in my lot with the servants of the Crucified; I am content even to share their delusion, if delusion it be, for it is the truth of the God of men to me; I will stand or fall with the story of my Lord . . .” (3, 29)
So strong is MacDonald’s emphasis on relationship with Jesus that he left me wondering how he views the Cross. We catch a glimpse of an answer in Wingfold’s thoughts about Leopold, who is in personal darkness because he has committed a serious crime:
Yet there was a human soul crying out after its birthright. Oh, to be clean as a mountain-river! clean as the air above the clouds, or on the middle seas! as the throbbing aether that fills the gulf betwixt star and star! — nay, as the thought of the Son of Man himself, who, to make all things new and clean5, stood up against the old battery of sin-sprung suffering, withstanding and enduring and stilling the recoil of the awful force6 wherewith his Father had launched the worlds, and given birth to human souls with wills that might become free as his own! (3, 1)
MacDonald’s perspective here is apparently that at the crucifixion Jesus resisted and defeated the evil power that is directed at everything in God’s creation. Leopold’s darkness and sin is a product of this evil that only belief in Jesus can allay. However, MacDonald does not expand on this in the novel.7
Part of MacDonald’s goal in the novel is to show that people with differing personalities and backgrounds can come into a relationship with Jesus, and this is illustrated in two other characters, whose development is sketched more lightly than Wingfold’s.
One of these is Helen Lingard, described by MacDonald as spiritually asleep in the earlier chapters of the novel. But touched, almost against her will, by Wingfold’s preaching, her spirit is stirred when she is out riding one day with her atheist cousin:
On Helen’s cheek the wind blew cooling, strong, and kind. As if flowing from some fountain above, in an unseen unbanked river, down through the stiller ocean of the air, it seemed to bring to her a vague promise, almost a precognition, of peace — which, however, only set her longing after something — she knew not what — something of which she only knew that it would fill the longing the wind had brought her. The longing grew and extended — went stretching on and on into an infinite of rest. And as they still galloped, and the light-maddened colours sank into smoky peach, and yellow green, and blue gray, the something swelled and swelled in her soul, and pulled and pulled at her heart, until the tears were running down her face: for fear Bascombe should see them, she gave her horse the rein, and fled from him into the friendly dusk that seemed to grade time into eternity. (1, 33)
She slowly comes to realise that this stirring in her soul is the need for relationship with God:
She had come nearly to the point of discovering that the soul is not capable of generating its own requirements, that it needs to be supplied from a well whose springs lie deeper than its own soil, in the infinite All, namely, upon which that soil rests. Happy they who have found that those springs have an outlet in their hearts — on the hill of prayer. (2, 4)
The reader sees much less of Helen’s spiritual journey than of Wingfold’s, but she comes to faith at the very end of the novel.
Mr Drew, the draper, represents members of Wingfold’s congregation who are moved by his preaching. He approaches Wingfold because he feels that some of his behaviours as a shopkeeper and businessman are not in line with what he understands from Wingfold’s sermons, depite being accepted retail practice. He too becomes Polwarth’s disciple.
Now it was clear as day that — always provided the man Christ Jesus can be and is with his disciples always to the end of the world — a tradesman might just as soon have Jesus behind the counter with him, teaching him to buy and sell IN HIS NAME, that is, as he would have done it, as an earl riding over his lands might have him with him, teaching him how to treat his farmers and cottagers — all depending on how the one did his trading and the other his earning. (2, 6)
It is evident that MacDonald chooses a clergyman as his main character because he wants to address not only the spiritual development of the individual, but also the corruption of a church that does not preach the gospel:
Would that our pulpits were all in the power of such men as by suffering know the human, and by obedience the divine heart! Then would the office of instruction be no more mainly occupied by the press, but the faces of true men would everywhere be windows for the light of the Spirit to enter other men’s souls, and the voice of their words would follow with the forms of what truth they saw, and the power of the Lord would speed from heart to heart. Then would men soon understand that not the form of even soundest words availeth anything, but a new creature. (3, 7)
MacDonald has Polwarth shock the conservative Mrs Ramshorn, widow of a gentleman clergyman, when he expresses his view of the clergy:
Yes,” he said, “the great evil in the church has always been the presence in it of persons unsuited for the work there required of them. One very simple sifting rule would be, that no one should be admitted to holy orders who had not first proved himself capable of making a better living in some other calling.”
“I cannot go with you so far as that — so few careers are opened to gentlemen,” rejoined Mrs. Ramshorn. “Besides — take the bar, for instance: the forensic style a man must there acquire would hardly become the pulpit. But it would not be a bad rule that everyone, for admission to holy orders, should be possessed of property sufficient at least to live upon. With that for a foundation, his living would begin at once to tell, and he would immediately occupy the superior position every clergyman ought to have.” (3:18)
Thomas Wingfold, curate won’t be to every modern reader’s taste. In comparison with his contemporary Anthony Trollope, George MacDonald’s language is sometimes somewhat torturous and in 1876 already quite archaic. Wingfold’s long sermons and the curious story of the wandering Jew over several chapters in the middle of the novel tried my patience at times. But where Trollope’s The Warden, for example, offers light satire of the church and goes no further, MacDonald’s novel offers a towering vision of individual Christian faith and of what the church could be. In that respect it remains truly relevant. I enjoyed reading the novel. At times it challenged me personally.
- I have yet to read the other two. ↩
- MacDonald was a minister in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland until his discomfort with some of the more extreme aspects of Calvinist doctrine affected his ministry and he lost his position. ↩
- The notation (2, 3) says that the quotation is from Volume 2, Chapter 3. ↩
- 1 Corinthians 13:3. ↩
- Revelation 21:5. ↩
- I think MacDonald uses ‘awful’ here in its older sense of ‘full of awe, awe-inspiring’. ↩
- MacDonald’s theology is set out in a sermon entitled ‘Justice’ (Unspoken sermons, third series. London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1889, pp109-162). He does not believe that Jesus’ death on the cross was substitutionary, let alone penal, but that Jesus was the absolute revelation of God’s love. He invites us to follow his example, to have his mind and to obey him. Jesus’ death was the ultimate revelation of self-giving love in the face of evil. Without this revelation no one can turn from selfishness and draw near to God.
The fact that I find Thomas Wingfold, curate a very effective novel does not mean that I am in complete agreement with its author’s theology. ↩