Our February meeting will be Tuesday, February 13 after the 6 PM Evening Mass at St. Stephen’s in classroom 2.

That day is Mardi Gras, so plan accordingly!

The readings for the month of February are as follows:

• The Everlasting Man – Chapter II, Professors and Prehistoric Man
• The Everlasting Man – Chapter III, The Antiquity of Civilisation

Keep in mind, Chesterton wrote The Everlasting Man as a critique of and a response to H. G. Wells book The Outline of History. Wells’ book has 40 chapters in it. He begins his story with the origins of the earth from a thoroughly Darwinian point of view, and proceeds, from the same perspective, to give his history of prehistoric man. This takes up his first 11 chapters. The next 9 chapters are taken up in discussions and speculations about of race, early languages and writing, early civilizations and societies, and religion. Chapters 21-23 are about the Ancient Greeks, chapters 26-28 tackle Rome, Chapter 29 is on Christianity, Chapter 30 is on Asia, the remainder of the book centers around European and Middle Eastern history (as it relates to Europe).

For purposes of our next meeting, Chesterton is still writing about prehistoric man and society and criticizing the notions Wells was attempting to establish in his book. In addition to his triumphalistic Darwinism, Wells was an atheist, a socialist and a progressive, and these all influenced the form of his history. All these positions were anathema to Chesterton, and he unwinds their influence in popular history and science and shows them to be false gods (ideologies) used as props to support predetermined conclusions.

Also remember what Chesterton said in his Introduction. He wants his readers to see the things he is writing about in a unique light – he wants us to see them as if for the first time, not as familiar things we are used to seeing and paying no attention to. He wants us to see it and be startled by it.