I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
William Blake speaks here of Jerusalem, but he clearly means the New Jerusalem spoken of in the book of Revelation. We can and will, he says, create a maximally just and peaceful society in human history, within space and time – in England, to be precise. By the late 19th century, the Inevitability of Progress had become a popular idea in the West in both secular and Christian circles (the latter expressed this idea as “postmillennialism,” i.e., the doctrine that Jesus will come back after we’ve fixed the world).