The history of Christianity, therefore, must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.

Latourette’s sentence frames Christian history not as a parochial denominational chronicle but as a major thread in the wider “record of man.” The claim is twofold: first, that Christianity has been historically consequential—shaping institutions, moral vocabularies, education, art, and political life across many societies—and therefore belongs to general human history; second, that the present (“the contemporary human scene”) cannot be read clearly without understanding the long processes by which Christian ideas and communities interacted with cultures, empires, and modernity. Implicitly, the quote also argues for historical study as a tool of cultural self-understanding, not merely religious edification.