MAN AND CHRIST
The Everlasting Man. By G. K. Chesterton. (Hodder and Stoughton. 12s. 6d. net.) [A review of the first half of Mr. Chesterton's book was published in last week's issue of the Spectator.] SurrosE you find, by a stroke of lightning in the brain, that truth is a paradox (and Christianity is the religion of the utter-
most paradoxes). Suppose that, as by a miracle, you suddenly read white where the rest of the world reads black. And some dry and lifeless man, some sleep-walker, attempts to refute you upon the ground of common sense—the very ground you have tramped over for years, till you are familiar with every inch of it. He speaks as you know he will speak : you could bring out for him and propound with a ten times greater persuasive- ness every argument and every appeal to actuality that he is at such pains to discover. You could almost weep with exas- peration and boredom to have so sedulously displayed before you what you have taken for granted from your cradle, and still, to this day, take ineffably for granted.
Or to use an example of Mr. Chesterton's. Mary's part was better than Martha's ; a judgment which does violence to reason ; for Martha's part was obviously and superlatively right. There is no point in this relation unless we acknowledge that, by every conceivable standard, in every degree except that of mere apocalypse, Martha did well and Mary did ill. And yet there are people so leaden that they come to Martha's defence, Martha who needs no defence. " They actually complain of a paradox for not being a platitude." Suppose we were all Marys, they observe triumphantly. There is little enough chance of that ; but suppose we were ?
So it is with the divinity of Christ. Can anyone imagine that when we affirm that this same human consciousness, which moves in us so stumblingly and is so heart-breakingly ineffective to perceive or create the truth, -is yet the artificer of the universe, and keeps the stars in order ; that upon man depends the whole of creation, that man gives birth to animal and plant and mineral, not these to him—can anyone imagine that we are forgetting the evidence of evolution, the hard historic facts, the bitter chastening of common sense ? Christ's claim, " The Father in Me, and I in the Father," was absurd : and we need no intelligent expositions from Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells to convince us of its absurdity ; we live in the atmosphere of disproof : every breath we draw is a witness to the helplessness of man. Turn round to your neighbour and see there if Christ was divine. Look in yourself and see there if Christ was divine. And if you can experience, here now, in your miserable body, with your miserable mind, that nevertheless this human body and this human mind are a fit vehicle for the fullness of God, then, child of innocence, they may argue as they choose.
. Men have been at much trouble to avoid the paradox of Christianity. There was a religion which nearly conquered the world—Mithraism. With a strange and beautiful mythology and a philosophical exactness which must astonish us still, it proved that God is the image of man. We see by the laws of sight, we hear by the laws of hearing ; our universe is the projec- tion of our movements of consciousness. Anthropomorphism is nothing to be surprised at, or suspicious of. What measure can there be for man's universe but man himself?
So God is man. But that truth, that paradox and apocalypse of Christianity, is rejected. God is an abstract man. He belongs still to the world of potencies and myths. God is the type of man ; but the type can only reproduce itself in shadows : there is no incarnated God. This is a religion we can explain away, to the by of all rationalists ; for what harm can there be in believing upon a God who never leaves the abyss ? The God of Mithraism is an eternal future, who recedes more and more from us as more and more time is consumed by the moving present. He is a future so remote and unsettled that it shall never come into being. Mithraism was well suited to be the religion of the West ; for included in most European minds is a fantasy of progress to an end which can never be accomplished ; a living perfection which can never live.
Christendom fights with all Paganism upon this central dogma : for Paganism is that dear and generous instinctive hope that somewhere there is an ideal world which is not also the actual world., that somehow the problems of the universe can be solved by myth. And Paganism constructed the most worshipful and complex systems of myth, and made spiritual meanings show behind all material facts. Is it a small or superstitious thing to say to Paganism " But your myths are
real " ? Is there some naivete and unselfconsciousness in affirming that spiritual meanings are not behind facts, but in facts ? That the goal is not yonder and everlastingly yonder ; but here and everlastingly here ?
If the divinity of Christ is rationalized, then the whole of Christianity may go with it : the world is chockful of moral reformers and estimable counsellors. We are glad to be pro- vided with them ; but the supply will never fail and the birth of a moralist has never called forth a star, the death of a moralist has never darkened the sun. Yet who but a Christian can know what an amazing act is demanded before we can accept the divinity of Christ ? The scientific critic, Mr.
Chesterton writes,
" laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated ; and mildly condemns as impro- bable something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible ; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. . . . Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step. Stark, staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modern metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the Judgment, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowds, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the iensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither snd the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter's spprentice said-calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder : ' Before Abraham was, I am.' "
We might well wish that in any " outline of history " Mr. Chesterton's book should be borne constantly in mind ; and that any writer upon evolution should at least puzzle himself for some years with the question " But what is it that has
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