Faith & Spirit Quote by Roland Allen

Allen’s sentence is a tripwire: touch the idea that non-Christian “morality” or “religion” might be spiritually sufficient, and it snaps shut on what he sees as the real issue - not comparative ethics, but loyalty. He frames the debate in monarchical terms (“Christ,” “throne,” “deposing”), turning missionary hesitation into an act of inner coup. That’s rhetorically clever and strategically forceful: it relocates the argument from the distant “heathen” to the missionary’s own soul, where the real drama of obedience and authority is supposed to play out.

The intent is disciplinary. Allen isn’t chiefly trying to describe other faiths; he’s trying to police the Christian conscience. By calling alternative traditions “heathen,” he keeps the category morally charged and safely external, then uses that external “consideration” as the tempting pretext for retreat. Compassion, cultural respect, even intellectual openness become suspect - not because they’re false, but because they might “absolve” the believer from the hard, socially risky work of evangelism. In Allen’s subtext, tolerance can be a sophisticated form of cowardice.

Context matters: Allen wrote in an era when Western missions were entangled with empire, and when “comparative religion” was beginning to unsettle older certainties. His line tries to hold the center by insisting that the gospel is not one option among many but a sovereign claim. The cost of granting legitimacy elsewhere, he warns, is not merely a revised theology; it’s the quiet dethroning of Christ inside the self.