Religion: Century’s View

When in 1883 the Rev. Dr. Arthur Judson Brown, 27, left Chicago’s McCormack Theological Seminary for his first pastorate in Ripon, Wis., Czar Alexander II of Russia and President James A. Garfield had recently been assassinated, and Karl Marx was only four months buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Later, after Dr. Brown became secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in 1895 and began wandering the Far East, he found a Manchu-ruled, painfully awakening China hovering on the verge of the Boxer Rebellion and a frenziedly Westernizing Japan building toward the Russo-Japanese War. Last week in Manhattan, Dr. Brown, 100, rose firmly to his feet at the centennial banquet given him by the Board of Foreign Missions and the Church Peace Union, and talked about how the world had changed since he was young.

All things considered, said Dr. Brown, it had become a great deal better. Young people were improving: “I do not sympathize with the common lament that the young people of today are not what they once were. Thank God they are not.” The churches, he added, have defects aplenty, but they, too, are better than their counterparts in the last century, and their membership has increased faster than the population. What about the prospects of world peace? Said Dr. Brown: “A century ago war was an accepted method of settling international disputes. Wars have ravaged the world in this century, but there is a stronger moral protest against them … If the conditions of the last century had existed in this generation, a third world war would have begun before this.” As for Asia, it has heard plenty of the man buried in Highgate, and the Christian witness carried east by Dr. Brown and fellow missionaries is in danger of being swamped by nationalism. “All over Asia and Africa, the people are responding to the slogan, ‘The white man must get out.’ ” But this is no new crisis; it is “part of a great world movement in progress for centuries.”

In a personal aside, Dr. Brown claimed he stayed young by eating plenty of New England boiled dinner, dismissed the experts who warned that such heavy fare would finish him: “Well, here I am and the dietitians are all dead.” That is also his attitude about the prophets who say that Christian missions are finished in Asia. A hundred years from now, he seems to feel, missionaries will still be there—and the gloomy prophets will be dead.