The Progression of Worlds

19. Progress is one of the laws of nature. All animate and inanimate beings of creation are submitted to it by the goodness of God, who wills for everything to grow and prosper. Death, which to humans appears to be the end of things, is only a means of reaching a more perfect state through transformation,  since everything dies in order to be reborn, and nothing suffers annihilation.

At the same time that living beings progress morally, the worlds they inhabit progress materially. Whoever could follow a world in its different phases, from the instant in which the first atoms destined to  constitute it  began to agglomerate, would see it traveling an incessantly  progressive scale, but by degrees imperceptible to each generation, and offering its inhabitants a dwelling more agreeable as they themselves advance on the path of progress. Thus, the progress of human beings, animals (their helpers), plants and the forms of habitations progress in parallel; nothing in nature remains stationary. How grand this idea is and how worthy of the magnificence of the Creator! On  the other hand, how small and unworthy of the Creator’s power is the idea that focuses his kindness and providence on the imperceptible grain of sand that is the earth and restricts humankind to the few humans who inhabit it!

The earth, according to that law, was once materially and morally in a state inferior to today, and under this dual aspect it will reach a more elevated degree. It has arrived at one of its periods of transformation, in which, from being an expiatory world, it will become a regenerative one; then humans will be happy because God’s law will reign on it.

St. Augustine (Paris, 1862)