PT Sep-78 - Herbert W. Armstrong Library and Archives

Leonard's Eleven Reasons
for the Spread of Christianity
1) The advance of the United States
across the North American continent;
the extension of British political
dominion around the world,
enforcing peace where there had
been nothing but anarchy-the pax
Britannica; the partition of Africa
by Europe.
2) The harnessing of steam power to
t!"avel by ship and rail; the Suez
Canal. (Followed in but a few
decades by the Panama Canal, the
automobile, diesel power and the
airplane.)
3) The telegraph and the post office.
(And, in due course, the telephone,
followed rapidly, once the twentieth
century began, by radio and TV.)
4) World exploration.
5) The forcible opening of China by
the Opium War, 1842, and of Japan
by Admiral Perry and the American
fleet in 1853.
6) Changes in the charter in 1813,
1833 and 1857, forcing the British
East India Company to allow missionaries
into their domain, whom
they at first regarded as more dangerous
to their possessions and rule
than anything else.
7) Independence in La tin America;
the spread of the idea of religious
freedom even in Iran and the Turkish
intelligent, each one trained to think
and act for himself, with democracy
in the State reacting upon the
Church, a people loving liberty better
than life" (p. 47).
An Open Door
In America, too, as the eighteenth
century neared its end, zeal, faith
and doctrinal understanding were
low. In Leonard's words, "the only
zeal left was for an orthodoxy which
was stone dead" (p. 49).
But then a revolution occurred.
"The closing years of the eighteenth
century constitute in the history of
Protestant missions an epoch indeed,
since they witnessed nothing
Empire (which was in the 1800s dominant
over most of the Middle East).
Under this head come all the freedoms
of poli tical democracy.
8) Multiplication of Bibles and
Christian literature. ("It was not until
within a few decades [of Leonard's
original writing in the 1890s]
that the art of printing emerged
from infancy" [A Hundred Years of
Missions, p. 136].) It had taken 1500
years to get the Bible into 23 languages,
and that in manuscripts
only. The complete Bible was published
in Chinese in 1811 and the
trend continued. (The Russians,
nominally Christian for centuries,
got their first complete translation
only in 1876, but today the Bible is
available at least in part in all but a
handful of the world's 3000-odd
languages and dialects.)
9) The emancipation of women, permitting
them a chance to help in
missionary work, either as wives or
as unmarried helpers and teachers.
10) Increasing availability of converted
native personnel.
11) The quickening interest in spiritual
things in the homelands. No
small part of this is the awakening
of care for others-in effect, "brotherly
love."
less than a revolution, a renaissance,
an effectual and manifold ending of
the old, a substantial inauguration
of the new . . .. Beginning in Great
Britain, it soon spread to the Continent
and across the Atlantic. It was
no mere push of fervor, but a
mighty tide set in, which from that
day to this has been steadily rising
and spreading" (p. 69).
It was the age of William Carey,
looked back on as the beginning of
modern missions and methods in
backward lands, though even his
work in very few years came to
naught. Indeed, Leonard shows the
failure of just about every effort begun
before the end of the century.
"Yet his [Carey's] work does represent
a turning point; it marks the
entry of the English-speaking world
on a large scale into the missionary
enterprise-and it has been the
English-speaking world which has
provided four-fifths of the non-Roman
missionaries from the days of
Carey to the present time" (p. 2.61).
The Zenith of Britain
and America
When the United States and Canada
experienced the so-called Great
Awakening from about 1790 to
1830, a surge of evangelistic fervor
to reach and convert the masses was
channeled into an effort to Christianize
the frontier. Meanwhile began
the formation of British,
American and European missionary
and/or Bible societies. From a slow
start in 1804, new societies proliferated
after the 1820s at the astounding
rate of nearly three per
year for the rest of the century. Neill
mentions the important societies
formed to 1842. "And then the list
becomes so long .. . it is no longer
possible to follow it. By the end of
the century every nominally Christian
country and almost every denomination
had begun to take its
share in the support of the missionary
cause" (Neill, p. 252).
This time-finally-efforts in heathen
lands began to be markedly
successful. If, until the nineteenth
century, all missionary activity had
been pushed under the door or
thrown through the transom, at last
the door to the world was open.
Leonard points out II major factors
in the worldwide spread of
nineteenth-century missions and
Christianity (see box), having principally
to do with modern technological
achievements and the
predominant part played by the
English-speaking peoples in giving
their benefits to the rest of the
world.
To Leonard's categories should be
added at least two more points: first,
a vast increase since about the 1830s
in the materials available for biblical
studies through libraries, private
collections and monasteries, and
through archaeological discovery;
second, and perhaps most important
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The PLAIN TRUTH September 1978