Religion: 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 cliché in press and pulpit.

Nonsense! cries Baptist Kenneth Scott Latourette, Professor of Missions and Oriental History in the Yale Divinity School: the world...