of history has the purpose of securing the happiness of a small
portion of the human race in another world; it does not postulate a
further development of human history on earth. For Augustine, as for
any medieval believer, the course of history would be satisfactorily
complete if the world came to an end in his own lifetime. He was not
interested in the question whether any gradual amelioration of
society or increase of knowledge would mark the period of time which
might still remain to run before the day of Judgment. In Augustine's
system the Christian era introduced the last period of history, the
old age of humanity, which would endure only so long as to enable
the Deity to gather in the predestined number of saved people. This
theory might be combined with the widely-spread belief in a
millennium on earth, but the conception of such a dispensation does
not render it a theory of Progress.

Again, the medieval doctrine apprehends history not as a natural
development but as a series of events ordered by divine intervention
and revelations. If humanity had been left to go its own way it
would have drifted to a highly undesirable port, and all men would
have incurred the fate of everlasting misery from which supernatural
interference rescued the minority. A belief in Providence might
indeed, and in a future age would, be held along with a belief in
Progress, in the same mind; but the fundamental assumptions were
incongruous, and so long as the doctrine of Providence was
undisputedly in the ascendant, a doctrine of Progress could not
arise. And the doctrine of Providence, as it was developed in
Augustine's "City of God," controlled the thought of the Middle
Ages.

There was, moreover, the doctrine of original sin, an insuperable