Professor Robert Paul and his family had just returned to Hartford Seminary from a trip to the Rocky Mountains. As a doctoral student in church history studying with him I had always been stimulated by his lectures and seminars. Now, I was anxious to talk with him and with his gracious and perceptive wife, Eunice, to get their impressions of the trip.

Paul, a native of England, was ecstatic about the natural beauty of America, but he also was appalled by the lack of appreciation for what he called “a sense of being rooted in history.” Most American Christians live in the present, and long for the future, he contended, but they have little recollection of the past. In his own England he was constantly reminded of the past with its plethora of Medieval churches and cathedrals, ancient Roman r…