Since I’ve found church history quite a bit more interesting lately, Chesterton’s final chapter (The Five Deaths of the Faith) was one of the better ones. His observations about how Christianity seems to die every few hundred years and then blossom with fresh life is a very hopeful sentiment indeed. One can see the hand of God sustaining us, instead of we of little faith tossed on the seas of heathen sociology and politics.
The whole chapter is good, so a bit difficult to quote from.
At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died…
Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.
-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.288
It ends with a word of advice to critics. Oh every few years some celebrity critics crop up. Richard Dawkins. Bart Ehrman. Whoever. Some of them need to keep this in mind:
If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err; they will no longer watch for it to end.