is later life and one difficulty in
dealing with it adequately was expressed in a letter from William
Lyon Phelps thanking the author for "a magnificent work of genius and
never more needed than now. I took out my pencil to mark the most
important passages, but I quickly put my pencil in my pocket for I
found I had to mark every sentence." Reading the book for perhaps the
seventh time I can only say (I hope without irreverence) what G.K.
himself says happens to those who can read the words of the Gospels
"simply enough." They "will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon
them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words
about such words as these."

"Rocks rolled upon them." Did he not feel crushed, overwhelmed at
times by his own thought on these immensities, or can the philosopher
carry his thoughts as lightly as Gilbert so often seemed to carry
his? I think not always. He must have needed superhuman strength to
conceive and give birth to this mighty book. The thoughts sketched in
_The New Jerusalem_ had grown to their full fruition in an atmosphere
of meditation. It would be much easier to give an outline of _The
Everlasting Man_ than of _Orthodoxy_, much harder to give an idea of
it. For _Orthodoxy_ consists of a hundred brilliant arguments while
_The Everlasting Man_ really is a vision of history supported by a
historical outline. Comparing his own effort with that of H. G.
Wells, Chesterton says, "I do not believe that the best way to
produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines." He is like
Wells however in not being a specialist but claiming "the right of
the amateur to do his best with the facts the specialists
provide"--only their specialists are different specialists and their
facts therefore largely different facts.

Chesterton, unlike most converts, wrote concerning his own conversion
the least interesting of his later books: but in _The Everlasting Man_
he is not at all concerned with his own spiritual wayfaring, he
merely wants to make everyone else look at what he has come to see at
the end of the way. The book is an attempt to get outside Man and
thus see him as the strange being he really is: to get outside
Christianity and see for the first time its uniqueness among the
religions of the world. Why are not all men aware of the uniqueness
of Man among the animals and the uniqueness of the Church among
religions? Because they do not really look at either. Familiarity has
dulle