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PARTISAN REVIEW
great Protestant powers-England, Germany, and the United States.
The old promise is being fulfilled; the followers to the true God are
inheriting the world.
Without question, the most influential expression of confidence and
expectancy for America's future was Josiah Strong's magnum opus,
Our
Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis.
The work was originally pub–
lished in 1886 as a long essay for the Home Missionary Society. By 1916,
one hundred and seventy-five thousand copies had been sold and, by then,
specific chapters had been reprinted in newspapers and magazines innumer–
able times.
It
"mirror[ed] the thoughts and aspirations of th[e] dominant
segment of American society towards the close of the nineteenth century .. :'–
Protestantism. In Strong's view the closing years of the nineteenth century
comprised a defining moment in world history-comparable to the
German Reformation and second only to the birth of Christ. "The world,"
he declared, "is to be Christianized and civilized." Yet, "[t]here are about
1,000,000,000 of the world's inhabitants who do not enjoy a Christian civ–
ilization." What is required? In his own words, in order "that all men may
be lifted up into the light of the highest Christian civilization" the "two
great needs of mankind ... are, first, a pure, spiritual Christianity, and sec–
ond, civil liberty.
Without controversy, these are the forces which, in the past, have con–
tributed most to the elevation of the human race, and they must
continue to be, in the future, the most efficient ministers to its
progress. It follows, then, that the Anglo-Saxon, as the great repre–
sentative of these two ideas, the depository of these two greatest
blessings, sustains peculiar relations to the world's future, is divinely
commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother's keeper.
Time and again, Strong emphasized that America is home to "the
largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization." For this
reason, " ... God, wi th infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo–
Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world's future ." The destiny
of America and the world is clear. For Strong, the choice was between
whether America would seize the moment or let it slip by. Nothing less
than the eschaton was at stake.
. . . I believe it is fully in the hands of the Christians of the United
States, during the next ten or fifteen years, to hasten or retard the
coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, and perhaps
