The Everlasting Man Lives

I have completed reading The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton and was impressed by his unique insights.  One point he makes strongly in the last chapters is how Christianity is distinct from all other religions and worldviews.  As different as human beings are to plants, so is Jesus Christ and His claims unique from all others.  Jesus did not call people to religion but to life, and this life could only be found in Himself.  His resurrection from the dead is also unique, without parallel in the history of the world.  The fact Jesus did not remain dead and His followers still continue strong in this age of reason is troubling to many.  It has been attacked by atheists, strangled by legalism, debated by scholars, scorned by intellectuals, and discarded by the inoculated.  And yet Christ lives on.  Chesterton wrote, "These people are quite prepared to shed pious and reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of morning."  (Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1925 Reprint. Print. page 258)

Christians have died many deaths, but like our Saviour Jesus Christ Christianity will endure forever with truth, hope, and love.  Chesterton's observations still ring true, and every rational, thinking mind cannot lightly dismiss them.  Like many before him and since, Chesterton is a man who values and speaks truth in a world that does not particularly care for it.  If we value the truth, then we will seek and obtain it at any cost.  And once obtained, we ought to strive to live our lives in light of that singular, objective truth.  Our natural eyes are unable to see it clearly.  Pontius Pilate asked, "What is truth?" when the Way, the Truth, and the Life was standing before Him in the person of Jesus Christ, the man who "broke the backbone of history."  The whole world is flowing downstream, and Christianity alone swims upstream as a testimony of inexhaustible life.  As the song goes, "He lives, He lives.  Christ Jesus lives today!  He walks with me and talks with me along life's narrow way."

'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.'  The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world:  and men no more dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight.  They could not imagine another order unless it were in another world.  The civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away.  In the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that no man could imagine himself without a lord:  and religion was so woven into that network that no man would have believed they could be torn asunder.  Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in the popular life of the of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power in that new freedom was the old religion.  Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pas away.  The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its turn and here at least it was thought that the words would die.  They went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints.  It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution.  Science explained it away; and it was still there.  History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future.  To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch it, it grows.

If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies, will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death.  They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.'  They will watch for it to stumble, they will watch for it to err, they will no longer watch for it to end.  Insensibly, even unconsciously, they will in their own silent anticipations fulfill the relative terms of that astounding prophecy; they will forget to watch for the mere extinction of what has so often been vainly extinguished; and will learn instinctively to look first for the coming of the comet or the freezing of the star. (Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1925 Reprint. Print. page 260-260)