Faith on the March was indeed written by A.H. Mcmillan who died in 1966. I remember reading it way back in 1976 when an elderly Witness whom I much loved loaned me her personal copy. I have never read Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose but I did read the 1975 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses which also laid out a “history” of the organization in the United States. It started with a young Charles Taze Russell in 1870 and went to 1973. While it was certainly a sanitized version of that history, it made for fascinating reading nontheless.
Our friend steve2 is right to point to the ‘elegant spin’ the WTS has put on its history although, to be fair, it is hardly the only religious organization to have ever done so. I recall reading a book about the history of the Roman Catholic Church that was published under the imprimatur of Pope Pius XII which did exactly the same thing. The Mormon Church has done likewise with its official publications so we shouldn’t be surprised to see the WTS walk the same path.
The aims of all such official histories is the same: keep the rank-and-file pacified and reassure them that they are indeed part of the “one true Church” and have no need to look elsewhere. It supplies them with enough carefully chosen facts as well as outright distortions to answer the questions and blunt the criticisms of most challengers. That 1975 Yearbook certainly helped me out in that way as I used its portrayal of events to answer the very few people I met in field service who also had a grasp of Witness history. For most Witnesses I knew who also took the time to actually read that Yearbook, it served to strengthen their belief that they had the “truth.”
Quendi