xperience was governed and controlled by
an inexorable fate that was totally indifferent to human
wishes. The formula which finally arose to meet this situation
was "conformity to nature," a submission to the iron laws of
the world which it was vain to attempt to change.

This idea was succeeded in medieval Europe by the idea of
providence, in which the world was thought of as a theater on
which the drama of human redemption was enacted. God has
created man free, but man was corrupted by the fall, given an
opportunity to be redeemed by the gospel, and the world was
soon to know the final triumph and happiness of the saved. Most
of the early church fathers expected the end of the world very
soon, many of them in their own lifetime. This is distinctly
different from the preceding two ideas. All life had meaning to
them, for the evil in the world was but God's way to
accomplish his good purposes. It was man's duty to submit, but
submission was to take the form of faith in an all-wise
beneficent and perfect power, who was governing the world and
who would make everything for the best.

The idea of progress arose on the ruins of this concept of
providence. In the fourteenth century, progress did not mean
merely the satisfaction of all human desires either individual
or collective. The idea meant far more than that. It was the
conviction that the world as a whole was proceeding onward
indefinitely to greater and greater perfection. The atmosphere
of progress was congenial to the construction of utopias and
schemes of perfection which were believed to be in harmony with
the nature of the world itself. The atmosphere of progress
produced also optimists who were quite sure everything was in
the long run to be for the best, and that every temporary evil
was sure to be overcome by an ultimate good.

The difficulty in demonstrating the fact of progress has become
very real as the problem has been presented to modern minds. It
is possible to prove that the world has become more complex. It
is hardly possible to prove that it has become better, and
quite impossible to prove that it will continue to do so. From
the standpoint of the Mohammedan Turks, the last two hundred
years of the world's history have not been years of marked
progress; from