In the third century after Christ the faith continued to spread.

Latourette’s sentence is a compact historical claim about early Christianity’s momentum: even in the third century—an era marked by periodic imperial hostility, internal disputes, and regional instability—the Christian movement did not stagnate but continued to expand geographically and socially. The emphasis on “continued” implies a longer trajectory of growth across the first three centuries, suggesting that Christianity’s spread was not a sudden, isolated phenomenon but a sustained process. In Latourette’s broader historiographical style, such statements typically serve to frame the church’s expansion as a major long-term development in world history, unfolding amid—and sometimes because of—the pressures of the Roman world.