The Old Soul and his diary

This site is an attempt to bring George MacDonald's The Diary of an Old Soul, published in 1880, to today's audience. Although it consists entirely of prayers and meditations, I think you'll see it's not your average daily devotional or inspirational flip calendar.

George MacDonald was a writer, erstwhile minister, and lifelong theologian who lived in nineteenth century Scotland. Although he always considered himself primarily a poet, it was his popular novels such as Phantastes, Robert Falconer, At the Back of the North Wind, and The Princess and the Goblin that brought him fame and put him in literary circles with contemporaries such as Dickens, Tennyson, and Wilkie Collins. But his heart was at home, with his beloved wife Louisa and their twelve children.

Above all, MacDonald was a Christian whose simultaneously tender and passionate devotion to God as an infinitely good Father permeated everything he wrote. His Diary of an Old Soul is no exception, though it serves as a window into his heart at a time in which those convictions were being shaken by circumstances unlike he had ever endured before.

MacDonald in 1880, the year The Diary of an Old Soul was published

At 56, MacDonald had many years of life left when this book was published (he died at 80 in 1905), but the two years prior had aged his soul considerably: Diary is a chronicle of a spiritual journey beginning in the dark times following the loss of two of his children and represents his often solemn meditations on the difficulties of faith in a world of pain and doubt. This explains the full published title: Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul. The weight on his "old soul" gives these poems a noticeable sense of gravity, but his devotion to a Father he trusted as the source and personification of perfect love manages to infuse the poems with hope rather than despair.

The genius of this work was that it was published as a two-way diary: his daily poems were printed on the right page and the opposite page was left blank. As he explains in the book's dedication (paraphrased as I deemed appropriate at the top of every page on this site):

Sweet friends, receive my offering. You will find
Against each worded page a white page set:--
This is the mirror of each friendly mind
Reflecting that. In this book we are met.
Make it, dear hearts, of worth to you indeed:--
Let your white page be ground, my print be seed,
Growing to golden ears, that faith and hope shall feed.

YOUR OLD SOUL