Christianity in the New World
A History of the Expansion of Christianity : Volume Three.
By Kenneth Scott Latourette. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. ifts.) Willi this new volume Professor Latourette's monumental history begins its survey of the progress of Christianity in the modern world. It embraces the "three centuries of advance" from i5oo to i800, and ranges over the countries of America, Africa and Asia. In Volume II, Dr. Latourette had described the first great losses of territory which Christianity had suffered : the advance of Islam from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries, and the defection of many of the traditional strongholds and most highly civilised centres of the Faith. In the present volume he shows how these losses were amply made up by the evangelisation of the new worlds whose discovery had accompanied the Renaissance. •
A valuable introductory chapter gives us a conspectus -f the state of ecclesiastical Europe in the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth. Christianity was facing a major crisis. It was now an old and established religion, and in conflict with its younger rival it showed few of those qualities which might lead a dispassionate observer to hope for its survival. The medieval culture of which it was a part w,,s passing, and moral decay had fastened upon the high placs of the Church itself. The question arose whether Christianity had enough vigour to permeate the new culture of Europe and to extend its influence to the New World.
The succeeding chapters of Dr. Latourette's book are a detailed reply to this question, a triumphant vindication of the Faith's vitality. The rise of Protestantism was itself part of the answer to that challenge, and it is pointed out that it was Protestantism which now, in these changed circumstance,,, made the deeper impression upon mankind. But the Roman Catholic Church, too, had its answer, in the formation of new religious communities, in many ways strikingly different from the old. The first chapters of this volume, indeed, which describe the evangelising of Spanish, Portuguese and French America, might be described as a history of the Society of Jesus in the New World.
It is a story of brutality, of tragedy and of epic heroism which Dr. Latourette unfolds. The Spanish conquest was marked by the vilest atrocities ; and it was the part of the Church, in many instances, to put a check upon these horrors. Some Spaniards believed the Indians not to be really human, and to be incapable of receiving Christianity ; and though this view was condemned by the Popes and by most Christian scholars, much of the initiative on behalf of the Indians had to come from individuals. Bartolome de Las Casas, the first Christian priest to be ordained in the Americas, devoted a life of intense activity and suffering to the welfare of the Indians. Eusebio Francisco Kino, a Jesuit, accomplished a similar work in Northern Mexico.
The story of Protestantism in the Americas, though not so colourful and dramatic, is of permanent interest for the development of the American mind. It is the story, for the most part, of Dissent in action—of a Puritanism which was Dutch and French as well as English, with a good sprinkling of Lutheranism. Of such varied stuff was the pattern of North American religion made. The Church of England was a favoured body in certain provinces, such as Virginia ; but in spite of this it often failed to touch the hearts of the people. It had no resident bishop, and with the coming of Methodism and the "Great Awakening" it slipped rapidly into the background.
Later chapters of the book deal, in varied detail, with the spread of the faith in Africa, India, the East Indies, Russia, China and Japan. There is a copious bibliography and maps.
BERNARD BLACKSTONE.
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