The Everlasting Man (Christian Heritage Series) by Chesterton, G. K. (Author). Chapter 2 of Part 2: “The Riddles of the Gospel.” One can argue as to which chapter in this book is the most important, but surely this would be one of them. While only 13 pages in length (in the 1955 Image Books edition that I have), it is loaded with wonderful truths. It was this book especially that helped C. S. Lewis to abandon his atheism and convert to Christianity.

It was Francis Bacon who once said: “Some books are to be tested, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Many of us have our favourite books in this regard. And Charles Spurgeon said this about the matter:

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analysis of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be, ‘much not many’.

Not just books, but authors as well need to be regarded in a selective fashion. Some are good to briefly read and then move on from, while other authors you keep going back to, over and over again. Obviously for me G. K. Chesterton is one such author.

I just looked it up, and in nearly 200 articles I have written about, referred to, or quoted from Chesterton on this website. As I keep saying, he is one of my all-time favourites, as he would be for so many others. Just yesterday I featured a number of quotes from his 1925 classic, The Everlasting Man: billmuehlenberg.com/2022/07/23/chesterton-and-the-everlasting-man/

One Chesterton fan just sent in a comment with one of his fave quotes from the book (thanks Steven). But it made me think I need to pen another piece of quotes from this amazing book. The quote he mentioned came from a chapter I did not quote from at all yesterday, and it is such a vital chapter.

I refer to Chapter 2 of Part 2: “The Riddles of the Gospel.” One can argue as to which chapter in this book is the most important, but surely this would be one of them. While only 13 pages in length (in the 1955 Image Books edition that I have), it is loaded with wonderful truths. As I noted in my earlier piece, it was this book especially that helped C. S. Lewis to abandon his atheism and convert to Christianity.

So this book – and this particular chapter – is well worth quoting from. The whole chapter of course should be read, but let me offer some select portions of it.

“We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well….” p. 190

“A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly of inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of mildness. It would be intensely interesting; but part of the interest would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained. It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather-chart of their own. The Peter whom popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in forgiveness, ‘Feed my lambs.’ He is not the Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’.” p. 191

“If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in which he may be said to present himself eminently as a practical person, it is in the aspect of an exorcist….”

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