07.00. Everlasting Man
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
Contents Introduction: The Plan of This Book
PART ONE ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN 01 The Man in the Cave 02 Professors and Prehistoric Men 03 The Antiquity of Civilisation 04 God and Comparative Religion 05 Man and Mythologies 06 The Demons and Philosophers 07 The War of the Gods and Demons 08 The End of the World
PART TWO ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST 09 The God in the Cave 10 The Riddles of the Gospel 11 The Strangest Story in the, World 12 The Witness of the Heretics 13 The Escape from Paganism 14 The Five Deaths of the Faith 15 Conclusion: The Summary of This Book 16 Appendix I: On Prehistoric Man 17 Appendix II: On Authority and Accuracy <http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/content.htm>
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, werre 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. 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 smalltalk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed ?
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