G. K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man

Chap

I. the Man in the Cave 19

II. Professors and Prehistoric Men 39

III. the Antiquity of Civilisation 58

IV. God and Comparative Religion 89

V. Man and Mythologies 111

VI. the Demons and the Philosophers 129

VII. the War of the Gods and Demons 154

VIII. the End of the World 171

Part II

On the Man Called Christ

Chap

I. the God in the Cave 191

II. the Riddles of the Gospel 211

III. the Strangest Story in the World 227

IV. the Witness of the Heretics 245

V. the Escape from Paganism 267

VI. the Five Deaths of the Faith 288

Conclusion: the Summary of This Book 302

Appendix I.: on Prehistoric Man 313

Appendix II.: on Authority and Accuracy 315

Introduction

The Plan of This Book

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any real independent intelligence to-day; and that is the point of this book.

The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current an anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain-clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward’s castle; though they do not call an editor’s office a coward’s castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalists. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the…