Again, who was it that appointed the earth to keep the center, and gave order that it should hang in the air:  that the sun should travel between the tropics, and never exceed those bounds, nor fail to perform that progress once in every year:  the moon to live by borrowed light; the fixed stars (according to common opinion) to be fastened like nails in a cartwheel; and the planets to wander at their pleasure?  Or if none of these had power over other:  was it out of charity and love, that the sun by his perpetual travel within these two circles, hath visited, given light unto, and relieved all parts of the earth, and the creatures therein, by turns and times?  Out of doubt, if the sun have of his own accord kept this course in all eternity, he may justly be called eternal charity and everlasting love.  The same may be said of all the stars; who being all of them most large and clear fountains of virtue and operation, may also, be called eternal virtues:  the earth may be called eternal patience; the moon, an eternal borrower and beggar; and man of all other the most miserable, eternally mortal.  And what were this, but to believe again in the old play of the gods?  Yea in more gods by millions, than ever Hesiodus dreamed of.  But instead of this mad folly, we see it well enough with our feeble and mortal eyes; and the eyes of our reason discern it better; that the sun, moon, stars, and the earth, are limited bounded, and constrained:  themselves they have not constrained nor could.  “Omne determinatum causam habet aliquam efficientem, quae illud determinaverit:”  “Everything bounded hath some efficient cause, by which it is bounded.”

Now for Nature; as by the ambiguity of this name, the school of Aristotle hath both commended many errors unto us, and sought also thereby to obscure the glory of the high moderator of all things, shining in the creation, and in the governing of the world:  so if the best definition be taken out of the second of Aristotle’s “Physics,” or “primo de Coelo,” or out of the fifth of his “Metaphysics”; I say that the best is but nominal, and serving only to difference the beginning of natural motion from artificial:  which yet the Academics open better, when they call it “a seminary strength, infused into matter by the soul of the world”:  who give the first place to Providence, the second to Fate, and but the third to Nature.  “Providentia” (by which they understand God) “dux et caput; Fatum, medium ex providentia prodiens; Natura postremum"[39] But be it what he will, or be it any of these (God excepted) or participating of all:  yet that it hath choice or understanding (both which are necessarily in the cause of all things) no man hath avowed.  For this is unanswerable of Lactantius, “Is autem facit aliquid, qui aut voluntatem faciendi habet, aut scientiam:”  “He only can be said to be the doer of a thing, that hath either will or knowledge in the doing it.”