Faith & Spirit Quote by George MacDonald

MacDonald rigs this sentence like a moral trap: you read it thinking it will diagnose human frustration, and it ends by putting human desire on trial. The first clause sounds almost like a bit of tough-love psychology before “because” turns the knife. It’s not that the world is stingy or fate is chaotic; the problem is taste. We don’t want “the best,” we want the manageable, the flattering, the immediately gratifying. MacDonald’s critique isn’t that people are weak so much as that they are selective in a spiritually self-protective way: we choose wants that won’t cost us our habits.

Then he commits the bolder move: God also “finds it hard.” That’s an audacious bit of anthropomorphism for a Victorian Christian writer, and it’s doing rhetorical work. It makes divine generosity feel less like a cosmic vending machine and more like a relationship with friction. The twist is that God’s difficulty isn’t reluctance; it’s insistence. “He would give the best” frames God not as a negotiator but as a giver who refuses to downgrade the gift to match our appetite. The sting lands in the last phrase: “man will not take it.” The obstacle is consent, not supply.

In MacDonald’s theological universe (deeply influential on later writers like C.S. Lewis), grace is not a coupon for comfort; it’s an invasive kindness aimed at renovation. “Best” implies a good so thorough it threatens the smaller goods we cling to. The line works because it reframes disappointment as misrecognition: we keep asking for less, then blame heaven for not delivering more.