SOURCE: “‘I Wis We War A' Deid!’: Lilith,” in The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Vision of George MacDonald, Christian University Press, 1982, pp. 85-111.

In the following essay, Hein examines MacDonald's theological beliefs as they are expressed in Lilith.

“There is no joy belonging to human nature, as God made it, that shall not be enhanced a hundredfold to the man who gives up himself—though, in so doing, he may seem to be yielding the very essence of life.”

—From the sermon “Self Denial,” Unspoken Sermons II

Almost thirty-five years after writing Phantastes, MacDonald in 1890 began Lilith, a fantasy for adults that he intended to be the final imaginative embodiment of his deepest beliefs. Greville records that “he was possessed by a feeling—he would hardly let me call it a conviction, I think—that it was a mandate direct from God.” When Louisa MacDonald read the manuscript...