Chapter 11.—Concerning the
Universal Providence of God in the Laws of Which All Things are
Comprehended.
Therefore God supreme and true,
with His Word and Holy Spirit (which three are one), one God
omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and of every body; by
whose gift all are happy who are happy through verity and not
through vanity; who made man a rational animal consisting of soul
and body, who, when he sinned, neither permitted him to go
unpunished, nor left him without mercy; who has given to the good
and to the evil, being in common with stones, vegetable life in
common with trees, sensuous life in common with brutes,
intellectual life in common with angels alone; from whom is every
mode, every species, every order; from whom are measure, number,
weight; from whom is everything which has an existence in nature,
of whatever kind it be, and of whatever value; from whom are the
seeds of forms and the forms of seeds, and the motion of seeds and
of forms; who gave also to flesh its origin, beauty, health,
reproductive fecundity, disposition of members, and the salutary
concord of its parts; who also to the irrational soul has given
memory, sense, appetite, but to the rational soul, in addition to
these, has given intelligence and will; who has not left, not to
speak of heaven and earth, angels and men, but not even the
entrails of the smallest and most contemptible animal, or the
feather of a bird, or the little flower of a plant, or the leaf of
a tree, without an harmony, and, as it were, a mutual peace among
all its parts;—that God can never be believed to have left the
kingdoms of men, their dominations and servitudes, outside of the
laws of His providence.