While during the nineteenth century the reassuring faith in a power steering from above the world's course was declining, the faith in history increased. History was seen as the force that gave the world's affairs direction and that eventually would purge the world from its evils.¹ The Christian hope for a "new heaven and a new earth" was thus transformed into the secular hope for a better earthly future. Although for many people God had died, most people could still see their lives as meaningful — as steps in the grand historical process in which the imperfect world was slowly recreated into a perfect world of prosperity and justice.²