Mr. H. G. Wells has confessed to being a prophet; and in this matter he was a prophet at his own expense. It is curious that his first fairy-tale was a complete answer to his last book of history.
The early reference to H. G. Wells (just one of many) is significant because The Everlasting Man was instigated by the publication of The Outline of History. In that text, Wells situates the primary purpose of man as to commit to ever-increasing evolutionary steps from primitive barbarity to civilization. This evolution—drawing upon Darwinian theory—requires first and foremost the necessity for human beings to adapt. While generally more admiring of this work than he was most others by Wells, Chesterton finds fault in the underlying thesis being forwarded: that such evolutionary movement toward civilization is steady and uniform. It is precisely this flattened steadiness that Chesterton views with doubt as it seems to negate his view that the history of mankind is one where some leaps forward are much more significant than others.
Whatever else men have believed, they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind This sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws.
Many people have tried to create a dyadic relationship between man and other animals to reveal what distinguishes us from them. (You know what separates us from animals? Only man laughs at something funny. That kind of stuff.) Few have ever put it as succinctly and responsibly as Chesterton does here. Consider the implications of his proposition: everything humanity has done on an evolutionary scale which has taken the species to the top of the ladder has been done, at least in part, because humans looked at their failings from a moral perspective and adjusted accordingly. From this beginning it is easy to see where Chesterton is going when he asserts that certain events in mankind’s evolution are way more significant than others.
I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things.
This is a key quote not just because the author is explaining part of his greater motivation in addressing the issues he explores in his text. The above passage is comprised of just forty-six words yet imagery of “seeing” occurs three different times. Over the course of the entire book the phrase “to see” or one of its many grammatical variants appears more than fifty times. The admonition against looking but not actually seeing things as they really are is part of the author’s intensive philosophy of calling upon the imagination to fill in what seem to be missing gaps or unanswered mysteries.
There is such a thing as the point of a story, even if it is a story in the sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero appearing, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus, mature and without a mother, is obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being born like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother.
And yet, imagination must be grounded in the possible and not fly happily off into the sphere of the fanciful impossibility. The author’s answer to the question of why Christianity rather than some other religious faith conceived by ancients is dutifully filed away with this passage. On the surface, of course, it does make complete sense. A god being born from a human mother as a baby is possible (theoretically at least) while a fully formed prophetic hero appearing like magic from the mind of a god is equally ineffable, but much less reasonable.
