Stooping to taste a single rosy apple no bigger than a cherry, Mr. Vane is suddenly surrounded by a chattering multitude of children — the Little Ones — who pronounce him “a good giant!” because his hand reached for a second sweet apple. They test him with a huge green apple; he bites, gags, and flings it away, and they swarm him with kisses of delight. But their joy turns to terror: a clownish “bad giant” saw the rejected apple, and he and a second brute overpower Vane, drag him to their wretched huts of fallen branches, and set him to a dreary slavery — scraping bark from every fruitless branch while they cuff him for refusing their bitter food. Two kinds of greatness stand on the same hillside: littleness that loves and discerns, and bigness that has swelled into greed — and the difference is which apple you can stomach.
The Point of ReferenceBefore we judge anyone a “good giant” or a bad one, we need a fixed standard of the good itself — or our verdicts are only taste, and one man's rotten apple is another's feast. This series anchors every judgment, as it anchors every law of logic, in the Logos of John 1: the unchanging “I AM” of Exodus 3:14, in whom goodness is not a preference but a Person. Because He does not change, a sweet fruit is really sweet and a sour one really sour; the children's instinct that “littleness isn't everything” and that one may “grow big and stupid” presupposes a measure outside themselves. This chapter's question — how do small ones see truly while big ones go blind? — only has an answer if there is an “I AM” who defines what tasting and seeing rightly even means.
Exodus 3:14 · Greek (LXX)
καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεὸς πρὸς Μωυσῆν Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν· καὶ εἶπεν Οὕτως ἐρεῖς τοῖς υἱοῖς Ισραηλ Ὁ ὢν ἀπέσταλκέν με πρὸς ὑμᾶς.
Exodus 3:14 · ESV
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
The whole drama of the chapter turns on a mouth — what one will swallow and what one will fling away. The Little Ones know Vane is good because he likes their apples; the bad giants beat him because he will not eat their bitter food. Scripture speaks exactly this language: the redeemed are those who have “tasted that the Lord is good,” and discernment is a palate trained on truth.
Psalm 33:9 (LXX) [34:8 ESV] · Greek
9γεύσασθε καὶ ἴδετε ὅτι χρηστὸς ὁ κύριος· μακάριος ἀνήρ, ὃς ἐλπίζει ἐπ' αὐτόν.
Psalm 34:8 · ESV
8Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Matthew 18:3 · Greek
3καὶ εἶπεν· Ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν μὴ στραφῆτε καὶ γένησθε ὡς τὰ παιδία, οὐ μὴ εἰσέλθητε εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν.
Matthew 18:3 · ESV
3And said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The word David uses for the Lord's goodness is the very word a Greek would use of good wine or fruit — sound, sweet, agreeable to a healthy palate. It is the audible near-twin of Χριστός, “Christ,” a pun the early church loved. To “taste that the Lord is chrēstos” is to find Him the one wholly wholesome food — while the bad giants force on Vane a diet that is, by contrast, “inexpressibly disagreeable.” A corrupted appetite calls the good apple foul and the foul one good.
Growth without form is a tumor, not a triumph
The children's warning is biologically exact: bigness is not maturity. In living things, healthy development is differentiation — cells specializing, structures ordering toward a function. Mere unchecked increase in mass, growth that has lost its governing pattern, is precisely what we name a tumor. MacDonald's “bad giants” are Little Ones who only enlarged: more matter, less mind, “just enough mind to give them motion and the expressions of anger and greed.”
Notice too the chapter's quiet botany. The good trees are the fruit-bearing ones in the hollow; Vane is enslaved to scrape bark from “every branch that had no fruit on it.” A barren branch drains the tree that a fruitful one feeds — a fact of horticulture that doubles, all by itself, as a parable of which lives nourish and which merely take.
Can goodness be read off an action?
The chapter stages a small problem in moral epistemology. From one fact — Vane reaching for a second sweet apple — the children infer a whole character: “He's a good giant!” The narrator himself doubts the inference (“how from that they argued me good, I did not see”). Is goodness even the kind of thing a single gesture can reveal?
MacDonald's answer is that the test is not the sweet apple but the green one: the children watch what he does with the bitter thing offered as if it were good. Character shows not in enjoying the obviously pleasant but in rejecting the plausible counterfeit. The bad giant's rage — “Do you dare tell me my apple was not fit to eat?” — is the fury of a relativist whose private taste has been called objectively wrong.
Two ways of being great
Stand the figures side by side on the hillside and a whole metaphysic of greatness appears. The Little Ones are small in stature yet vast in love, discernment, and joy; the giants are large in stature yet shrunken in soul, “a sort of fungoid people.” Real magnitude, the chapter insists, is not measured along the axis the eye uses. To swell is to lose being; to remain childlike is to keep it.
This is the great inversion the whole book will press: that selfhood is not enlarged by grasping but by giving. The bad giant clenches around his apple, his food, his slave — foreshadowing Lilith's defining sin, the clenched hand that will not open. Greed is not a strong form of being; it is being in the act of dissolving into a fungus.
Become as children, or be unmade
Every thread ties at Matthew 18:3. The Little Ones are an extended icon of the child Jesus set in the midst of grasping disciples: to enter the Kingdom one must turn and become small. The giants are the unconverted bigness those same disciples were chasing — greatness as domination, which Scripture everywhere names as the way of death.
And the bark-scraping slavery is its own gospel image. Vane is bound to a tree and made to strip the fruitless branches — while he is secretly kept alive by quietly eating from a good dwarf-tree close at hand. So the believer labors in a hostile country, sustained by a hidden food the foes cannot see, until the Vinedresser comes for the branches that bear nothing (John 15:2).
The sweet apple is sweet and the bitter food is bitter, whatever a kick demands. The bad giants beat Vane “because I would not swallow” their food, as if force could revise a flavor. But identity is not for sale: a good apple stays good, and “one bad apple may grow on the best tree” without making the tree bad or the apple good. A thing keeps being itself even when greed insists otherwise.
The giant's howl — “Do you dare tell me my apple was not fit to eat?” — demands that the rotten apple be at once unfit (Vane spat it out) and fit (the giant's pride requires it). It cannot be both. And the children's own paradox resolves cleanly: one may be little in body yet not little in worth, because “littleness isn't everything” speaks of two different respects, not one self-contradiction.
“He's a good giant!” — “He's a giant!”: the children press the very question the reader must answer. On this hill one is either friend or foe; Vane cannot be a little neutral nibble of both. He bites the green apple and flings it away — a deed that decides him. The chapter allows no fence-sitting between the Lovers and the giants; you eat their fruit or you do not.
Pleasant Springs Church — Discipleship School