# “What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation” by G.K. Chesterton

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2018/03/27/what-they-were-looking-at-was-the-first-day-of-a-new-creation-by-g-k-chesterton/
- Published: 2018-03-27T12:00:03-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first
Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans
setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the
body.

There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well
that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture
and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole
of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and 
covered over; and in that place it was buried.

It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was 
merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and
the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived.

But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead. On the 
third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave 
empty and the stone rolled away.

In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that
the world had died in the night.

What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven
and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden,
in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”

–G.K. Chesterton, _[The Everlasting Man](https://amzn.to/2pEAUdU), [The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 2](https://amzn.to/2pEAUdU)_(
San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 2: 344–345.

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