What does TS Eliot mean by "old dispensation" in The Journey of the Magi? In T. S. Eliot's poem The Journey of the Magi he's offering a imaginative view into the interior experience of one of the wise men from the East who came to Jesus's birthplace.

The last few lines of that poem are:


  We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
      But had thought they were different; this Birth was
      Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
      We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
      But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
      With an alien people clutching their gods.
      I should be glad of another death.  


What does he mean by old dispensation here?  Does this come from the Bible (I can't find it there)?  Does it come from church history?
He means the same thing as "the old covenant" (Judaism), but stated in the language of dispensationalism, which classifies the different timeline "slices" of God's plan. We tend to think of it as old covenant/new covenant but if you start getting really anal about it and analyzing "what about before Moses" and "what about after the Rapture" you get a bit more of a complicated set of salvation schemes over time, or "dispensations."

Edit: I guess I'm surprised that this is a contentious or misunderstood point, has no one heard of dispensationalism? I provided the links above for a reason. Mastery and escape: T.S. Eliot and the dialectic of modernism discusses Eliot's dispensationalism specifically and how he uses this term in much of his writing. He was, you know, into it.