men should change the world in such a manner? And yet they did so; no Christian can deny it; God has said it; God has carried His words into effect.
Therefore whatever God ordains we must look on as just, because He Himself says it is rightly ordained. For whenever God does anything we must look, not at the apparent possibility or credibility of the matter, but at the unlimited power of the Almighty, to whom nothing is impossible, although we may not be capable of seeing how the thing is done. Now if we hold everything as true that God has done and said, because He is almighty and infallible, although we may not understand what He has done, why should we not also look on whatever Divine Providence effects in the world as just and right, although we sometimes cannot see how things can be just or right? For God is not less holy and just than powerful, and He has said too that all His decrees are right and just. If the infinite power of God can produce effects that surpass our understanding, why should not Divine Providence also ordain things that we cannot explain, nay, that seem to us inconsistent? If we poor mortals could grasp the works and decrees of God, He would not be a wonderful, incomprehensible God. Meanwhile we are all the more bound to submit humbly our understanding, and to approve of as just and right everything that such a wonderful, incomprehensible, most wise and just and holy God ordains in the world by His inscrutable decrees.
The works of men often seem foolish to us, until we understand them, when we are forced to approve of them. Shown by examples.
But why do I speak of the works and decrees of God? How many acts and plans of men do we not condemn as foolish, inconsistent, and wicked, because we do not understand the motive of them, while it we happen to nave them properly explained to us afterwards we see that they were reasonable, sensible, and holy? The Sultan Amurath, as Nanus writes in his History of the Turks, was attacked by a grievous illness, and as he lay on his bed he commanded all the crystal vessels that he had collected from all parts of the world to be brought before him, and then broken in pieces; nor would he rest until his command was fulfilled to the letter. Now tell me why he acted in that manner? Would you not say that he was in a delirium from the fever, since he gave such a foolish command? Or else that he acted through a spirit of grudging, not wishing that others should have the vessels that he could no longer use? Such should have been our opinion if we had been present on the occasion; but we should have been grievously mistaken. Amurath got well again, and after his recovery explained the reason of his conduct; he had often drunk
