The Everlasting ManChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Everlasting Man
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Catholic Church -- Apologetic works; Christianity and other religions; Religion
of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority
on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that
they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour)
‘by rather slack Christians.’
Now if we were to dip below the surface of history, as it is not in the
scope of this argument to do, I suspect that we should find several
occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from
within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell
stood as the Pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that
in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the
fathers had been slack about it. This is obvious in the case of the
transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It is
obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century to the
many Catholic revivals of our own time. But I suspect many other
examples which would be worthy of separate studies.
The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed
somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might
have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or
tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side
by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this
western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing.
Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and
reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by
rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head of the corner;
by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the
capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and
as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic
renaissance every century or two, with the young Druids crowned with
fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has
not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round
Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids
is safe from the vandalism of restoration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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