Way of the Cross

The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

Even before Matthew Arnold brooded thus on Dover Beach in 1867, many Christians had been oppressed by a belief that Christianity was in a perhaps fatal decline, ailing within and sore beset from without. Indeed, the Dim View has been and is almost a cliche in press and pulpit.

Nonsense! cries Baptist Kenneth Scott Latourette, Professor of Missions and Oriental History in the Yale Divinity School: the world was never more Christian than it is today, not only in number and distribution of believers but also in practice of Christian principles. He backs up his own optimism with his massive seven-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity.

Latourette, a precise, energetic, bald bachelor of 61, lives behind monumental breastworks of filing cards and follows a daily timetable so efficiently that he found time to dash off five other books* while beavering away at his vast History. Completed in 1944, the work appears next week in a new edition (Harper, $22.50) to meet the demand of scholars who have hailed it as one of the most important studies of the last decade.

Resurgent Waves. Far from showing symptoms of senile enfeeblement, Christianity "in the past 150 years . . . has had its greatest geographic extension and its widest influence. . . . From every major period of decline there came a resurgence which made Christianity more potent . . .

than ever before." Example: "The great revivals in American Protestantism were in their incipient stages during the 18th Century recession and when rationalism, capped by the French Revolution, appeared to be spelling the doom of Christianity." The driving vigor of expanding Christianity, Latourette maintains, has been an "uncompromising loyalty" to the doctrine of Christ's divinity.

* The latest, The United States Moves across the Pacific, was published last week (Harper, $2), has no religious slant.

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