The Everlasting Man

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INTRODUCTION

THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.

The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back

to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story

I once wrote. It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic

to another story that I never wrote. Like every book I

never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.

It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use

it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth.

I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides,

like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are

scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose

farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels

to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant;

and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that

his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side

like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts

of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived,

but which was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think,

is a true picture of the progress of any really independent

intelligence today; and that is the point of this book.

The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best

thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really

outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular

critics of Christianity are not really outside it.

They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term.

They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has

taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling.

Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk.

They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we

should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared

us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a

sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle;

though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle.

It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it

would be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears

in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church;

the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him.

They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press

about why the churches are empty, without even going there