I first tried reading this around the time I got out of college. Then,
as now, I was a big fan of C.S. Lewis, and especially of his book Mere Christianity, and I’d been led to believe that this
was more of the same. And in fact, it was nothing like I expected; I
found it disappointing, and heavy going, and I soon abandoned it.

Now, the fact is, I was doomed from the start. Chesterton is not Lewis,
and must be enjoyed on his own terms. If they explored some of the
same territory, they explored it in completely different styles. Lewis
set out with little but surveying instruments of the highest quality;
Chesterton set out on elephant back, with Persian rugs and his entire
library in jeweled boxes at his side. If sometimes seems that it takes
Chesterton a full page to say what Lewis can say in a sentence or two,
still, Lewis does not provide us with such a dizzying panoply of
examples, illustrations, and allusions in every breath.

Suffice it to say that I appreciated the book much more this time around.

It’s difficult to summarize Chesterton, especially at this length, but
I’ll try. We moderns have gotten used to thinking of Christianity as one
religion among many: Christianity in this column, Judaism and Islam just
adjacent, with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism just beyond that.
That is, we’ve gotten the notion that all of these labels stand for
things that are much the same underneath, when nothing could be further
from the truth. In this book, Chesterton has undertaken to show us how
different Christianity is from all of these others, and indeed how
radically different it was at its inception from the Greco-Roman paganism
it replaced–that is, how different Christ, the everlasting man of the
title, is from Zeus and all that lot. Along the way he explodes a great
many sacred cows of his day, and it’s rather surprising to note how many
of them have calves roaming our streets even today.

It’s a fascinating book, frankly, and as always with Chesterton makes me
look at some familiar things in a new way. I’m clearly going to have to
re-read it in a year or so, though, just to see what I missed the first
time through.