By Henri Daniel-Rops
The Church of the Revolutionary Age: Christian Brotherhood, the tenth installment in Henri Daniel-Rops' magnificent History of the Church of Christ, explores the complex phenomenon of the "separated brethren"-all those who believe in and follow Jesus Christ, but are not in communion with the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. This volume focuses on Protestantism, surveying (1) the "Daughters of the Reformation"-Lutherans and Calvinists, Unitarians and Anglicans, Methodists and Baptists-to distill the essence of Protestantism; (2) Protestant geographical and political expansion in Scandinavia and Germany, England and France, and eventually (in maximal form) in the United States; (3) Protestant missionary efforts, both in co-operation and conflict with those of the Catholic Church; and (4) the "soul and spirit of Protestantism," its liturgy and spiritual forms, its social sensibilities, and its theologies.
Christ prayed that his followers may be one. Yet the history of his Church bears witness to the dreadful words of the Prophet Zechariah: "Strike the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered." With justice to its formidable and sensitive subject, Daniel-Rops' The Church of the Revolutionary Age: Christian Brotherhood is an absorbing account of the successes and failures of the sheep to be no longer separated, but unified in faith.
One cannot but be moved by this sentence written by Cardinal Mercier: "To unite, we must love one another; to love one another, it is necessary to know one another; to know one another we must meet one another." (Henri Daniel-Rops)
Henri Daniel-Rops (1901-1965), the nom de plume of Henri Petiot, was a French Catholic historian. His bibliography comprises seventy books-written over a span of just thirty years-and includes Sacred History, Jesus and His Times, and the monumental, ten-volume History of the Church of Christ. He also served as editor for the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, which consisted of one hundred and fifty volumes. Phenomenally successful in his own time, Daniel-Rops made religious history accessible and popular; in 1955, he was elected to the Acadmie franaise and in 1956 he received the Order of St. Gregory from Pope Pius XII.