bundant generosity of nature and treats man's intelligence and creative capacity as "evidence of the blessings he enjoys," not as evidence of his own godlike powers.

By throwing classical and Christian authors indiscriminately into the progressive camp, Nisbet loses sight even of the one insight that made the "secularization thesis" plausible in the first place—the recognition that Judaism and Christianity encouraged an interest in history in a way that classical and Oriental patterns of thought did not. The Greeks believed that the "eternal or timeless is the sole, ultimate, and complete reality," as A. D. Ritchie points out, while Jews and Christians believed that God reveals himself "through His creation, the material world, and especially through the course of temporal events we call human history." Such is the accepted and no doubt the correct interpretation—to which it is necessary to add, however, that neither the Hebraic nor the Christian attitude, although they rescued history from randomness, implied a belief in progressive improvement, let alone the crude celebrations of racial and national destiny so often associated with progressive ideologies in the modern world. Nor did they necessarily imply a belief in an earthly paradise in the future. Biblical references to the millennium could be interpreted in various ways, and the idea that the end of the world would be preceded by a thousand years of peace and plenty—allegedly the source of the idea of progress—was never the dominant view among Christians. It was not, in any case, a view that encouraged a progressive interpretation of human history. Premillennialists, as they came to be called in the nineteenth century, held that things were deteriorating at a rapid rate. It was precisely the wretched state of the world that portended the return of the Messiah and his imposition of a new order. Insofar as the idea of progress found favor among nineteenth-century Christians, it found favor among so-called postmillennialists—those who took the position that Christ's appearance in the first century already fulfilled the biblical promise of the millennium and provided man with the spiritual resources that would ultimately ensure his triumph over the powers of darkness.

But the heart of Christian hope lay elsewhere—neither in the earthly paradise at the end of time nor in the Christianization of society and the moral improvements it would bring. The essence of hope, for Christians, lay in the "conviction that life is a critical affair," as Richard Niebuhr

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