I am thankful for Logos providing us some of George MacDonald's works recently. As Rosie mentioned in a thread discussing this bundle, the book "Diary of an Old Soul" was not among those offered. This calendar devotional seems to be exceptional, one author wrote in the North Wind journal:
A Book of Strife, in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul (1880) may be George MacDonald’s most important poetic achievement: a towering but neglected work of Scottish religious verse (cf. Raeper 121ff). Although prepared for publication, The Diary of an Old Soul is largely a confessional text. In three hundred sixty-six modified rhyme royale stanzas, MacDonald expresses his own doubts and questions, hopes and fears, surrounding his devout religious belief. In it, he fulfils the promise of his first major poem, Within and Without (1855), shifting his concept of mystic pilgrimage out of an explicitly narrative frame and turning it instead into personal contemplation. MacDonald covers a broader spectrum of themes, questions, and speculations in The Diary than he does in his own specifically religious poems like “The Disciple” (1867); the entire poem, indeed, can be read as a form of prayer, an act of contemplatio of God in Christ. Only in his letters does MacDonald appear more vulnerable. In a sense, The Diary of an Old Soul may justly be said to be the touchstone of his work; it may be difficult if not impossible to comprehend MacDonald without understanding this poem.
Of course this caught my interest. The text - of course in the Public Domain - is freely available from several places on the web, I took archive.org's representation of the Project Gutenberg etext as my source (thanks to John Bechard who compiled this in the 1990s!). The original book was printed only on one page of the paper, thus leaving space for the reader's own thoughts. I tried to emulate this in my version by giving ample white space and a fill-in box for reflections.
1452.George MacDonald -Diary of an Old Soul.docx
Compile as a type Calendar Devotional to have it work as intended - you can even put it into a home page tile:
I grabbed a simple, non-original but expressive cover from a picture search - somehow it refuses to upload here.
