G.K. Chesterton was a devout man who wrote Christian apologetics profusely; he converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism when he began to feel that the Anglican church was losing sight of its orthodoxy and relaxing its principles too much. The Everlasting Man is one of Chesterton's most well-known works of apologetics, and was written as a response to The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, in which the author postulated a history of mankind that was distinctly Darwinian in tone and content. Prone to using his own spiritual journey as the framework for his writing, Chesterton this time focused on the spiritual journey of Western man as a whole.
The book is divided into two parts, the first, arguing against the Darwinian theory of evolution, the second questioning Wells' theory that Jesus was an extraordinary man with extraordinary charisma, rather than as the Messiah and the Son of God, and observing that if Jesus was just a man, he was a pretty unusual one, and if his followers found a religion in his teachings, that was pretty miraculous all round as well. In short, he contends that the story of Jesus and the creation of Christianity is too unusual to be explained by evolutionary science.
Chesterton was an English writer, theologian, philosopher and poet who also worked as a journalist and an art critic. He tended to rely heavily on proverbs, allegories and popular sayings in order to make his points. Despite his weighty output of Christian, religious and philosophical writing, he is best known for creating the popular detective Father Brown, which was adapted for television by the BBC, thus enabling him to reach an entire generation of readers who had previously thought of him as the writer of detective novels and not one of the leading apologetics theologians of his day. Chesterton's influence was wide; C.S.Lewis credits him with re-igniting his own interest in Christianity. In the early 1930s, Pope Pius XI invested him as a Knight Commander, awarding him the Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great. Chesterton died of congestive heart failure in 1936.
