The Everlasting Man

by G.K. Chesterton

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;

the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it.

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.

religious tradition: they are in a state of reac...

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...

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.

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.

the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be somethi...

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.

the moment we are really impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it.

an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial.

it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial.

I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are; in the sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative justice to all sides; and they cannot.

it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see it only as a slow substitute for a motor-car.

If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith.

I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little.

Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution,

Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something.

nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else;

For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one.

The ultimate question is why they go at all;

I should like to look into the evidence for them; but unfortunately I have never been able to find it.

It would be far better to tell the tale of what was really found

we do know for a fact that the cave-man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things.

This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature.

The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being;

It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane.

The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind;

In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make.

while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything.

Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was prehistoric.

The history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms. It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to indulge.

Human civilisation is older than human records.

But the art he did practice was quite artistic; his drawing was quite intelligent and there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would be quite intelligent,

unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism of current culture.

Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone.

The truth is that all this guesswork has nothing to do with anything.