Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote "Sweet Home Alabama" as a rejoinder to Neil Young's smug "Southern Man. Likewise, GKC wrote The Everlasting Man as a rejoinder to H.G. Wells' Outline of History.
In both cases, the rejoinders won.
The Everlasting Man explains history as part of the revelation of the Christ. It's no wonder that the Advent season figures largely in it.
Some choice passages:
"Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars."
"It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten."
"Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet."
"If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas."
"You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all."
"You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross."
