Faith & Spirit Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

A historian’s calmest verbs can smuggle in a worldview, and Latourette’s “continued to spread” does exactly that. The line treats Christianity’s expansion in the third century not as a fragile accident but as a durable social fact, a process with momentum. It’s deceptively placid: no martyrs, no emperors, no councils, just the quiet insistence of continuity. That rhetorical choice matters because the third century is usually framed as crisis-ridden - political instability, economic stress, intermittent persecutions, and competing religious options across the empire. “Continued” tells you Latourette isn’t interested in the sensational interruptions; he’s tracking the long arc that survives them.

The phrase “after Christ” also signals a familiar Christian chronological lens, common in mid-20th-century Anglophone scholarship. It situates the faith as the temporal reference point even when the empire that carried its roads and languages was still pagan-led. That’s subtext: Christianity is already being treated as history’s organizing principle, not merely one cult among many.

Contextually, the third century is when the religion’s infrastructure thickens: more urban congregations, more bishops coordinating authority, more theological boundary-setting against rival interpretations, more social reach through networks of care and patronage. Latourette’s intent is to normalize the growth - to suggest that the faith’s eventual imperial legitimacy in the fourth century wasn’t a sudden flip but the visible crest of earlier, steady accumulation.

The sentence works because it’s almost too simple: it makes the extraordinary seem inevitable, which is one of history-writing’s most persuasive tricks.