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...