with a gross rusticity admire His works.  Those highly magnify Him whose judicious inquiry into His acts, and a deliberate research into His creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.  Every essence, created or uncreated, hath its final cause and some positive end both of its essence and operation.  This is the cause I grope after in the works of Nature; on this hangs the providence of God.

That Nature does nothing in vain is the only indisputable axiom in philosophy.  There are no grotesques in Nature, nor anything framed to fill up unnecessary spaces.  I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north; but have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of Nature which, without further travel, I find in the cosmography of myself.  We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity:  besides that written one of God, another of His servant, Nature, that universal and public manuscript, that lies expansed unto the eyes of all.  Surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of Nature.  Now, Nature is not at variance with art, nor art with Nature, they being both the servants of His providence.  Art is the perfection of Nature.  Nature hath made one world, and art another.  In brief, all things are artificial, for Nature is the art of God.

This is the ordinary and open way of His providence, which art and industry have in good part discovered, whose effects we may foretell without an oracle.  But there is another way, full of meanders and labyrinths, and that is a more particular and obscure method of His providence, directing the operations of individual and single essences.  This we call fortune, that serpentine and crooked line whereby He draws those actions His wisdom intends in a more unknown and secret way.

This cryptic and involved method of His providence have I ever admired; nor can I relate the history of my life, the occurrences of my days, the escapes, or dangers, and hits of chance, with a bare grammercy to my good stars.  Surely there are in every man’s life certain rubs, doublings, and wrenches, which pass a while under the effects of chance; but at the last, well examined, prove the mere hand of God.  ’Twas not dumb chance that, to discover the fougade, or powder plot, contrived a miscarriage in the letter.  I like the victory of ’88 the better for that one occurrence which our enemies imputed to our dishonour and the partiality of fortune:  to wit, the tempests and contrariety of winds.