This new edition of George MacDonald's 1882 novel is updated and introduced by Michael Phillips as Volume 26 in The Cullen Collection.

This 1882 story of a dysfunctional family features another of MacDonald’s memorable female protagonists. Reminiscent of Mary St. John of Robert Falconer, Hester Raymount chooses a single life of ministry among London’s downtrodden (whose character and work were inspired by MacDonald friend and social activist Octavia Hill), who, like Mary Marston, uses her musical gifts to further that ministry.

In Weighed and Wanting, MacDonald explores societal conditions and the plight of the poor more directly than is his normal custom, bringing into wonderful harmony the temporal and the eternal. He gives us here a vision of ministry to the poor, suffering, diseased, and dying—a ministry imbued with the power of eternal Fatherhood. It is a balance few social reformers and few preachers through the centuries have been able to grasp, as the pendulum of “ministry” swings to the extremes but rarely finds the calm and quiet center.

It is in that center where Jesus lived and which MacDonald articulated in his writings. And though many consider Weighed and Wanting one of his minor works, it stands almost at the apex with one or two others in revealing, in a sense, this societal or social component of MacDonald’s overall vision of life.

 

325 pages