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The title of this article has been borrowed from one in The Atlantic Monthly for January 1944 by the Reverend Phillips Endecott Osgood, Rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston. In his opening paragraph he records that ‘at a recent conference at Columbia on Science, Philosophy, and Religion two delegates voiced the pungent opinion that “the entire missionary movement should be stopped”. They raised a vigorous demurrer to the axiom that “the post-war world can be built successfully only on the basis of Christianity” and categorically denied that “we are fighting to save Christian civilization”. Granted that only two of the delegates exploded this bombshell, nevertheless there are persons not delegates to this august conference who would second the motion—both at home and, more understandably, among the nationalists in the non-Christian countries’.
The rest of his article is chiefly taken up with an examination of that nationalist attitude in Japan, India, and China, and while he seems to be in general accord with the familiar Catholic thesis that ‘the Church can then only be said to be founded in a region when it is self-governing, with its own churches, its own native clergy, its own resources: in a word, when it depends on nobody but itself’ (S. Cong. Propaganda, May 20th, 1923), it is not clear that he rejects what he styles a ‘steady liberalization of Christian eredalism’, or that he looks upon Christianity as anything more than an ornament to ‘revivified native faiths—a higher Buddhism, a cultured Hinduism, a reborn Mohammedanism, a philosophic Taoism, an assertive Shintoism’.
