This web site doesn't display advertising. Please consider making a donation.

Free texts and images.

• Prefatory Note
• Introduction: The Plan Of This Book
• Part I: On the Creature Called Man
  • I. The Man in the Cave
  • II. Professors and Prehistoric Men
  • III. The Antiquity of Civilisation
  • IV. God and Comparative Religion
  • V. Man and Mythologies
  • VI. The Demons and the Philosophers
  • VII. The War of the Gods and Demons
  • VIII. The End of the World
• Part II: On the Man Called Christ
  • I. The God in the Cave
  • II. The Riddles of the Gospel
  • III. The Strangest Story in the World
  • IV. The Witness of the Heretics
  • V. The Escape from Paganism
  • VI. The Five Deaths of the Faith
• Conclusion and Appendices
  • Conclusion: The Summary Of This Book
  • Appendix I. On Prehistoric Man
  • Appendix II. On Authority and Accuracy

Prefatory Note

This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood. The view suggested is historical rather than theological, and does not deal directly with a religious change which has been the chief event of my own life; and about which I am already writing a more purely controversial volume. It is impossible, I hope, for any Catholic to write any book on any subject, above all this subject, without showing that he is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking fact. To suggest this I have not needed to go much beyond matters known to us all; I make no claim to learning; and have to depend for some things, as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more learned. As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.

This work is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less.