The Everlasting Man

The prefatory note sets the terms: this is history rather than theology, aimed at the assumption that Christ stands beside similar figures and Christianity beside similar religions. Chesterton says he wrote it in part as a reply to H.G. Wells's Outline of History, and congratulates Wells on the achievement while disputing its shape.

The first half, 'On the Creature Called Man,' argues that human beings are not a smooth continuation of animal life — the cave paintings, the making of art and religion, mark a discontinuity that evolutionary narratives smooth over. He then sorts pre-Christian religion into rough kinds: mythology, which he treats generously as the imagination reaching for something; philosophy; and the darker business of the demons, exemplified by Carthage.

The second half, 'On the Man Called Christ,' argues that the Gospels do not read like myth or like moral philosophy and that the figure in them cannot be reduced to a wise teacher. The closing chapters treat the church's repeated apparent deaths and recoveries as a fact requiring explanation. C.S. Lewis, still an atheist when he read it, later described the effect of this book on him in exactly those terms — that a young atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English journalist, novelist and critic who came to Christianity in adulthood from a liberal, sceptical background, wrote Orthodoxy as an Anglican in 1908, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1922.

The Everlasting Man (1925) belongs to his final decade and is generally regarded as his most ambitious work of argument. Its most consequential reader was C.S. Lewis, who encountered it while still an atheist and credited it with changing how he saw the whole shape of history.