George MacDonald took to preaching early in life. In his boyhood he once “rushed into the kitchen, jumped upon the clean-scrubbed table, and began a learned discourse, indicating Bell Mavor, the maid, as a reprobate past redemption”:

Before long MacDonald would grow uneasy with the Calvinist beliefs from which this childhood frolic takes its bearings. He would later characterise the religion of his youth as one in which “hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell” (Robert Falconer 1: 152). Coming to feel “that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong” (qtd. in Greville MacDonald 155), MacDonald in maturity embraced a broad and undogmatic theology, and – at the urging of F. D. Maurice – eventually joined the Church of England. Yet the impulse to preach never left him. MacDonald is now principally remembered as a writer of fantasy and fairy tales, but his literary career was in one sense a stand-in for the pulpit. He briefly served as a Congregationalist minister in Arundel before being forced out for his unorthodox views on salvation. Unable to secure another appointment, and sustaining “a hand-to-mouth existence” with his family in Manchester, MacDonald came to prose fiction “through economic necessity” (Raeper 103, 125). Even once he had achieved literary fame, MacDonald continued to preach occasionally by invitation. Over the course of his lifetime he would also publish several volumes of sermons never delivered – not simply spiritual reflections, but, as the title of a series of his volumes has it, Unspoken Sermons (1867–1889).