Challenge to Pessimists

Never has Jesus been so potent in the affairs of men as in the past 14 decades. The years from Anno Domini 1800 to Annum Domini 1940 have been the period in which he has moulded mankind as never before. This flat statement, a shock to many who have long accepted the glib belief that "the world is drifting away from Christianity," was not made by an ignoramus. It was made by Kenneth Scott Latourette. Professor of Missions and Oriental History at Yale University. Three years ago Dr. Latourette started writing a monumental six-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity. He made his flat statement last week in Anno Domini: Jesus, History, and God (Harper; $2.50), a single volume in which he streamlined his scholarly thesis.

Dr. Latourette admitted that Christianity "has had its ebb and flow." But "each high-water mark has reached farther than its predecessor, and each recession has not been so low as the one before it." Though the Church is now under fire in Russia, Germany, Japan and elsewhere, "the decline has been at least in part offset by numerical and territorial gains and by new currents of life."

To back his sweeping assertions. Historian Latourette had many a historic fact and argument. Samples:

Revival. "In the 19th Century came awakenings on an unprecedented scale. . . . Never before had the Roman Catholic Church been served by so many devoted spirits. . . . Protestantism became more vigorous than ever it had been."

Expansion. "Christianity was built into the structure of the new nations which emerged from the migration of Europeans, and it was carried to people who previously had been professedly nonChristian. . . . In the U. S. Christianity had sufficient life more than to keep pace with the phenomenal growth of the white population and to attract as well about half of the previously non-Christian Negroes and Indians."

Missionary Zeal. "This missionary movement arose out of the abounding energy of European and American Christianity. . . . Not since the initial two or three centuries of its history had Christianity been propagated from such purely religious motives or accepted on such exclusively religious grounds."

True Christianity. "It seems probable that in the last century and a half . . . Christians have more nearly conformed to Jesus than in any other period."

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