Christendom as a galvanised corpse
an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse
The comparison draws on a recognisable language of electrical reanimation. Mary Shelley supplies a particularly clear earlier witness: her new introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein imagines a corpse revived because ‘galvanism had given token of such things.’ She proceeds to describe an artificial body stirred into uneasy motion by a powerful engine. The novel first appeared in 1818; the introduction inspected here belongs specifically to its 1831 revision. Shelley, Introduction.
Chesterton turns that disturbing possibility into an affirmative historical metaphor. The point is stronger than the claim that Christianity preserved useful relics: something enters a civilisation that should have become a corpse and makes it move again. The final ‘jumps’ preserve the bodily comedy of the image, while the movement from ‘unnatural’ to ‘supernatural’ converts an apparent abnormality into possible evidence of divine action. Shelley's scene helps recover the imaginative register; it does not establish that Chesterton borrowed from her. Nor does the metaphor itself demonstrate that European survival required a supernatural cause.
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