This book is so good that choosing one passage to highlight is difficult. The statement below is all the more insightful in light of all that Chesterton has done in setting up as background a framework for understanding the pagan world and the pagan mindset, particularly where they had come to in the context of the Roman world into which Christ was born.
“It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.” (182)
-GK Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
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