d the edge of awareness. Men must be made to see them as though
for the first time; and it is the towering achievement of this book
that reading it we do so see them. "I 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.
And I say that in both cases when seen thus, they stand out from
their background like supernatural things." This being his desire, he
divides the book into two parts--"the first being the main adventure
of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a
summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming
Christian."

Notable as the first part is, it is only a preparation for the
second, which shows the Church not as one religion among many but as
the only religion, for it is the only Thing that binds into one both
Philosophy (or Thought) and Mythology (or Poetry), giving us a Logos
Who is also the Hero of the strangest story in the world. He asks the
man who talks of reading the Gospels really to read them as he might
read his daily paper and to feel the terrific shock of the words of
Christ to the Pharisees or the behaviour of Christ to the
money-changers: to look at the uniqueness of the Church that has died
so often but like Her Founder risen again from the dead.

Two untrue things, he felt, were constantly reiterated about the
gospel--one that the Church had overlaid and made difficult a plain
and simple story: the other that the hero of this story was merely
human and taught a morality suitable to his own age, inapplicable in
our more complicated society. To anyone who really read the gospels
the instant impression would be rather that they were full of dark
riddles which only historic Christianity has clarified. The Eunuchs
of the heavenly Kingdom would be an idea dark and terrible but for
the historic beauty of Catholic virginity. The ideal of man and woman
"in one flesh" inseparable and sanctified by a sacrament became clear
in the lives of the great married saints of Christendom. The apparent
idealisation of idleness above service in the story of Mary and
Martha was lit up by the sight of Catherine and Clare and Teresa
shining above the little home at Bethany. The meek inheriting the
earth became the basis of a new Social Order when the mystical monks
reclaimed the lands that the pr