ABSTRACT
The dissolution of the ancestral order is still under way, and much of people's current controversy is between those who hope to stay the dissolution and those who would like to hasten it. The prime fact about modernity, as it presents itself to people, is that it not merely denies the central ideas of people's forefathers but dissolves the disposition to believe in them. There has gone out of modern life a working conviction that people are living under the dominion of one supreme ideal, the attainment of eternal happiness by obedience to God's will on earth. The theory of divine government has always presented some difficulties to human reason, as people can see even in St. Augustine, who never clearly made up his mind whether the City of God was the actual church presided over by the Bishop of Rome or whether it was an ideal and invisible congregation of the saved.
