Success Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

Cosmic scale is doing strategic work here: it lifts the problem of evil out of the messy realm of politics, psychology, and history and relocates it in a totalizing narrative where nothing is merely local, accidental, or finally ambiguous. Latourette, a historian of Christianity writing in the mid-20th century, isn’t just expressing piety; he’s building an interpretive frame sturdy enough to survive world wars, mass death, and ideological upheaval. If evil feels systemic, mechanized, and global, his answer is to make the counter-story even bigger.

The subtext is an argument about authority. By insisting the drama “embraces the entire universe,” Latourette quietly demotes competing explanations - secular progress, Marxist materialism, psychoanalysis, liberal optimism - as too small for the evidence of catastrophe. “Seen and unseen” widens the stage further, nodding to modernity’s disenchanted worldview while refusing its limits: there are forces at play history can register but not fully diagnose. That line also flatters the reader’s unease, validating the sense that the horrors of the century exceeded ordinary cause-and-effect.

Then comes the clincher: “The victory is to be accomplished through Christ.” Grammatically, it’s passive, almost bureaucratic, as if the outcome is already filed. That calm inevitability is the rhetorical punch. Latourette isn’t inviting debate about how evil should be confronted; he’s asserting the plot. The intent is pastoral as much as intellectual: to make Christian faith not a private consolation but the governing explanation of reality itself, where history’s darkest data points become not refutations, but confirmation of the stakes.