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
occurred to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness;
and man became a living soul.
Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those
who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away.
Subconsciously they feel that it looks less formidable when thus
lengthened out into a gradual and almost invisible process. But in fact
this perspective entirely falsifies the reality of experience. They
bring together two things that are totally different, the stray hints of
evolutionary origins and the solid and self-evident block of humanity,
and try to shift their standpoint till they see them in a single
foreshortened line. But it is an optical illusion. Men do not in fact
stand related to monkeys or missing links in any such chain as that in
which men stand related to men. There may have been intermediate
creatures whose faint traces can be found here and there in the huge
gap. Of these beings, if they ever existed, it may be true that they
were things very unlike men or men very unlike ourselves. But of
prehistoric men, such as those called the cave-men or the reindeer men,
it is not true in any sense whatever. Prehistoric men of that sort were
things exactly like men and men exceedingly like ourselves. They only
happened to be men about whom we do not know much, for the simple reason
that they have left no records or chronicles; but all that we do know
about them makes them just as human and ordinary as men in a medieval
manor or a Greek city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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