THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27664, 21 May 1955, Page 3

THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

[Reviewed by L.G.W.I The Chrjstian World Mission in Our Day. By K. S. Latourette. Eyre and Spottiswode. 191 pp. The author of this book is one of the most learned church historians of modern times. His object in this book is to examine the prospects of Christianity in the immediate future. He begins by analysing the chief characteristics of what he caHs the world of yesterday viz the century from 1815 to 1914. It was an era of comparative peace, creative energy, expansion of the West, with the beginnings of revolutions in non-occidental cultures, and the world wide spread of Christianity. All this was accompanied by “the most open defections from the Christian faith which had occurred since the rise and early spread of Islam.”

Such a warning has become even greater in the world today. And yet the Gospel has, paradoxically enough spread, and new churches grown in new lands. This state of affairs presents a new challenge to the whole Christian Church. Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. Missions have to do more work with incomes that are for the most stationary in a world-wide inflation.

Dr. Latourette makes a number of suggestions for the training of missionaries, demands which, he admits, seem appalling. He thinks that we shall not be discouraged if we remember “those of earlier days” when the faith of such men as St. Paul achieved the impossible. His final chapter is entitled “What can we exSect?” In this he considers, in the ght of the New Testament, what measure of success the church may expect to have in the history of the world, whether this be long or short. We may summarise a lengthly argument by saying that his conclusion is that though “the goal is not to be attained within history, we must press forward towards it.” This is an important book, both profound and stimulating.