Chesterton Gilbert Keith - The Everlasting Man, Chesterton Gilbert Keith

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The Everlasting Man
by G.K. Chesterton
Originally Published 1925
This book is in the Public Domain
The Everlasting Man
by G.K. Chesterton
Introduction The Plan Of This Book
.......................................................................... 3
I. The Man in the Cave
.......................................................................................... 10
I. The God in the Cave
........................................................................................ 106
2
Prefatory Note
This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood. The
view suggested is historical rather than theological, and does not deal directly
with a religious change which has been the chief event of my own life; and about
which I am already writing a more purely controversial volume. It is impossible, I
hope, for any Catholic to write any book on any subject, above all this subject,
without showing that he is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned
with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is devoted to
many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and its thesis is that
those who say that Christ stands side by side with similar myths, and his religion
side by side with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula
contradicted by a very striking fact. To suggest this I have not needed to go much
beyond matters known to us all; I make no claim to learning; and have to depend
for some things, as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more
learned. As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of
history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage
and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and
intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right
of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.
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 really independent intelligence
today; and that is the point of this book.
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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 and 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 journalist. 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 churches are empty,
without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are
empty. Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate
in a three-act farce, and move us to comfort him after the manner of the curate in
the Bab Ballads; 'Your mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.' So we may
truly say to the very feeblest cleric: 'Your mind is not so blank as that of Indignant
Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street, or any of your critics in the
newspapers; for they have not the most shadowy notion of what they want
themselves. Let alone of what you ought to give them.' They will suddenly turn
round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they
themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be
able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan
sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and
agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is
that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the
advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited
by the War--they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood.
When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church
is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. But that
marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they are in a state of
reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and
well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as
a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an
intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor
the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian
controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-
Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks,
perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost
the light of the faith.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the
next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these
pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge
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would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now
most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into
the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never
understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he
knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does
not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he
would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic
Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as
impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who
very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all
pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow
missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of
Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them
fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be
battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed
cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the
mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its
pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic
procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the
Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper
as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their
wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of
negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it
would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another
continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare
indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at
bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to
stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go
outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an
obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the
Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to
do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.
But with this we come to the final and vital point I shall try to show in these pages
that when we do make this imaginative effort to see the whole thing from the
outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside. It
is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant that he sees that he
really is a giant. It is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar
under those clear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church
of Christ. To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial about it, we know
why people are partial to it. But this second proposition requires more serious
discussion; and I shall here set myself to discuss it.
As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid in the
solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was
exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led
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