1.

The idea of the universe which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, and
the general orientation of men's thoughts were incompatible with some of
the fundamental assumptions which are required by the idea of Progress.
According to the Christian theory which was worked out by the Fathers,
and especially by St. Augustine, the whole movement 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
obstacle to the moral amelioration of the race by any gradual process of
development. For since, so long as the human species endures on earth,
every child will be born naturally evil and worthy of punishment,
a moral advance of humanity to perfection is plainly impossible.
[Footnote: It may be added that, as G. Monod observed, "les hommes du
moyen age