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at Calvin College. Last updated on May 27, 1999.
Contacting the CCEL.
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Lilith -- ADAM EXPLAINS -- chapter xxx
chapter xxx
ADAM EXPLAINS
"WE must be on our guard," he said, "or she will again outwit us. She would befool the very elect!"
"How are we to be on our guard?" I asked.
"Every way," he answered. "She fears, therefore hates her child, and is in this house on her way to
destroy her. The birth of children is in her eyes the death of their parents, and every new generation the
enemy of the last. Her daughter appears to her an open channel through which her immortality--which
yet she counts self-inherent--is flowing fast away: to fill it up, almost from her birth she has pursued her
with an utter enmity. But the result of her machinations hitherto is, that in the region she claims as her
own, has appeared a colony of children, to which that daughter is heart and head and sheltering wings.
My Eve longed after the child, and would have been to her as a mother to her first-born, but we were
then unfit to train her: she was carried into the wilderness, and for ages we knew nothing of her fate. But
she was divinely fostered, and had young angels for her playmates; nor did she ever know care until she
found a baby in the wood, and the mother-heart in her awoke. One by one she has found many children
since, and that heart is not yet full. Her family is her absorbing charge, and never children were better
mothered. Her authority over them is without appeal, but it is unknown to herself, and never comes to the
surface except in watchfulness and service. She has forgotten the time when she lived without them, and
thinks she came herself from the wood, the first of the family.
"You have saved the life of her and their enemy; therefore your life belongs to her and them. The
princess was on her way to destroy them, but as she crossed that stream, vengeance overtook her, and she
would have died had you not come to her aid. You did; and ere now she would have been raging among
the Little Ones, had she dared again cross the stream. But there was yet a way to the blessed little colony
through the world of the three dimensions; only, from that, by the slaying of her former body, she had
excluded herself, and except in personal contact with one belonging to it, could not re-enter it. You
provided the opportunity: never, in all her long years, had she had one before. Her hand, with lightest
touch, was on one or other of your muffled feet, every step as you climbed. In that little chamber, she is
now watching to leave it as soon as ever she may."
"She cannot know anything about the door!--she cannot at least know how to open it!" I said; but my
heart was not so confident as my words.
"Hush, hush!" whispered the librarian, with uplifted hand; "she can hear through anything!--You must go
at once, and make your way to my wife's cottage. I will remain to keep guard over her."
"Let me go to the Little Ones!" I cried.
"Beware of that, Mr. Vane. Go to my wife, and do as she tells you."
His advice did not recommend itself: why haste to encounter measureless delay? If not to protect the
children, why go at all? Alas, even now I believed him only enough to ask him questions, not to obey
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Lilith -- ADAM EXPLAINS -- chapter xxx
him!
"Tell me first, Mr. Raven," I said, "why, of all places, you have shut her up there! The night I ran from
your house, it was immediately into that closet!"
"The closet is no nearer our cottage, and no farther from it, than any or every other place."
"But," I returned, hard to persuade where I could not understand, "how is it then that, when you please,
you take from that same door a whole book where I saw and felt only a part of one? The other part, you
have just told me, stuck through into your library: when you put it again on the shelf, will it not again
stick through into that? Must not then the two places, in which parts of the same volume can at the same
moment exist, lie close together? Or can one part of the book be in space, or somewhere, and the other
out of space, or nowhere?"
"I am sorry I cannot explain the thing to you," he answered; "but there is no provision in you for
understanding it. Not merely, therefore, is the phenomenon inexplicable to you, but the very nature of it
is inapprehensible by you. Indeed I but partially apprehend it myself. At the same time you are constantly
experiencing things which you not only do not, but cannot understand. You think you understand them,
but your understanding of them is only your being used to them, and therefore not surprised at them. You
accept them, not because you understand them, but because you must accept them: they are there, and
have unavoidable relations with you! The fact is, no man understands anything; when he knows he does
not understand, that is his first tottering step--not toward understanding, but toward the capability of one
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