In 1853, a young Scottish minister named George MacDonald stood before his congregation and spoke of a God whose love was deeper and stronger than human rebellion. His words unsettled church leaders, and before long he was removed from his pulpit. His health was fragile, his income uncertain, and his future unclear. The life he had trained for was slipping away.
So he began to write.
Not theological defenses. Not long arguments. He turned instead to stories. He wrote fairy tales and fantasies filled with forests that seemed alive, children who wandered into other worlds, and unseen goodness moving quietly beneath sorrow. His books did not make him famous. Many sold poorly. Some were barely reviewed. Yet MacDonald believed that truth could travel inside story in a way argument never could.
One of those stories was titled Phantastes. The name itself comes from a Greek root, phantezein, which means “to make visible” or “to bring before the mind.” That idea shaped everything he wrote. For MacDonald, fantasy was not escape from reality but a way of revealing it. True fantasy does not invent a different truth. It makes hidden truth visible.
He died in 1905, far from the spotlight of literary fame. By most public measures, his influence appeared small.
But influence does not always move in straight lines. Sometimes it works underground.
Years later, a wounded and skeptical young man named C. S. Lewis found a copy of Phantastes in a railway bookstall. Lewis had lost his mother as a boy and had slowly lost his faith as well. He trusted reason but kept his imagination guarded. When he opened MacDonald’s story, he did not feel pressed or corrected. He felt awakened. Lewis later wrote that his imagination was “baptized.”
That is the power of True Fantasy. It does not argue its way into the mind. It presents truth in such a way that the heart recognizes it.
Lewis did not adopt every theological conclusion MacDonald held. He would not follow him into universalism or every doctrinal path he explored. Yet Lewis allowed his imagination to be formed by MacDonald’s vision. He learned that holiness could be beautiful rather than cold, that goodness could be fierce without being cruel, and that longing itself might be evidence of something real.
Through story, MacDonald trained Lewis to see.
Lewis would later use that same method in The Chronicles of Narnia, where lions speak, wardrobes open, and children discover that another world stands behind this one. Narnia is not meant to replace reality but to illuminate it. The snow, the lamppost, the sacrifice on the Stone Table—all of it works to make unseen truth visible. Beneath that vision stands the quiet influence of MacDonald.
J. R. R. Tolkien shared a similar conviction about myth, though his path was shaped differently. Tolkien believed that human storytelling reflects the creativity of the Maker and that myth can carry truth deeper than plain explanation. While Tolkien drew more directly from ancient epics and his Catholic faith, he moved in the same stream that MacDonald helped widen: the belief that story can present reality to the mind in a fresh and piercing way. In Middle-earth, courage often looks small, hope seems fragile, and yet grace breaks in from beyond the visible world.
What makes this influence remarkable is not that Lewis and Tolkien copied MacDonald. They did not. Lewis admired him openly yet tested his theology against Scripture. Tolkien respected the power of fairy story while rooting his vision in a firm doctrinal frame. MacDonald formed their imaginations without controlling their convictions.
This is the quiet power of a formed mind. MacDonald believed that if the imagination could be trained to love what is good and long for what is true, the intellect would not be far behind. True fantasy, in his view, was not pretend. It was revelation through story.
He never lived to see Narnia or Middle-earth. He did not watch millions of readers step through wardrobes or walk the long road to Mordor. Yet his fingerprints remain, not in borrowed plots, but in awakened vision. He helped teach two of the twentieth century’s greatest Christian writers to see the world as charged with meaning and to tell stories that make the invisible visible.
And sometimes that kind of influence shapes the world more deeply than argument ever could.