The Early Christians - G. K. Chesterton

      God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun.

     But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid particular attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse.

     It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what they said.

     However mildly, there was a ring like iron.  Men used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said.

     All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor's statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock.

     With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were palpably present.

     They were important enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and walked swiftly past them.

     We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the center of a great space like lepers.  The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them.

     New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought the good news. That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution.

     Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round them.

     And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group, like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

    From The Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton, Chapter 8, "The End of the World."