THE EVERLASTING MAN by G.K. CHESTERTON read online

[Denise]

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, werre 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 smalltalk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed ?

http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/c ... /intro.htm

[KarlB]

I have a used bookstore in my town, actually one of the biggest in the lower mainland of BC, with something more than half a million books in stock.. and i always try pick up new Chestertons when they come in. Fr. Brown mysteries, fiction, essays, jounalism, philosophy.. he was extremely prolific.. i'm a big fan.

[Denise]

Do you have this one?
http://www.amazon.com/Father-Brown-Omni ... B001KR1E20

We found one just like it at the sale at the Anna library. It is in excellent condition.

[KarlB]

There are 5 volumes of Fr. Brown Mysteries, and i have 4 of them (Innocence, Scandal, Wisdom, Secret). The one i do not have in the Incredulity of Father Brown, but there's a nice collectors pocket edition at the bookstore with selections of all the collections which i intend to get.

[Denise]

The Incredulity of Father Brown is in this book. In fact they are all in this book.