With many tears I went in search of him,
Climbing high mountains which did still ascend,
And gave me echoes when I called my friend;
Through cities vast and charnel-houses grim,
And high cathedrals where the light was dim,
Through books and arts and works without an end,
But found him not – the friend whom I had lost.
And yet I found him – as I found the lark,
A sound in fields I heard but could not mark:
I found him nearest when I missed him most;
I found him in my heart, a life in frost,
A light I knew not till my soul was dark.
George MacDonald (1824 – 1905).
In this poem the author imagines God as an absent friend of the heart who has disappeared, but is always to to be found faithful. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) paid this tribute to George MacDonald: ’From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is, of all relations, the most central.’ Second, ‘The Divine Sonship is the key conception which unites all the different elements of his thought…. I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity.’
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