conception.  Shall God not give the rain, because there are low-lying places which will be thereby incommoded?  Shall the sun not shine as much as it should for the world in general, because there are places which will be too much dried up in consequence?  In short, all these comparisons, spoken of in these maxims that M. Bayle has just given, of a physician, a benefactor, a minister of State, a prince, are exceedingly lame, because it is well known what their duties are and what can and ought to be the object of their cares:  they have scarce more than the one affair, and they often fail therein through negligence or malice.  God’s object has in it something infinite, his cares embrace the universe:  what we know thereof is almost nothing, and we desire to gauge his wisdom and his goodness by our knowledge.  What temerity, or rather what absurdity!  The objections are on false assumptions; it is senseless to pass judgement on the point of law when one does not know the matter of fact.  To say with St. Paul, O altitudo divitiarum et sapientiae, is not renouncing reason, it is rather employing the reasons that we know, for they teach us that immensity of God whereof the Apostle speaks.  But therein we confess our ignorance of the facts, and we acknowledge, moreover, before we see it, that God does all the best [207] possible, in accordance with the infinite wisdom which guides his actions.  It is true that we have already before our eyes proofs and tests of this, when we see something entire, some whole complete in itself, and isolated, so to speak, among the works of God.  Such a whole, shaped as it were by the hand of God, is a plant, an animal, a man.  We cannot wonder enough at the beauty and the contrivance of its structure.  But when we see some broken bone, some piece of animal’s flesh, some sprig of a plant, there appears to be nothing but confusion, unless an excellent anatomist observe it:  and even he would recognize nothing therein if he had not before seen like pieces attached to their whole.  It is the same with the government of God:  that which we have been able to see hitherto is not a large enough piece for recognition of the beauty and the order of the whole.  Thus the very nature of things implies that this order in the Divine City, which we see not yet here on earth, should be an object of our faith, of our hope, of our confidence in God.  If there are any who think otherwise, so much the worse for them, they are malcontents in the State of the greatest and the best of all monarchs; and they are wrong not to take advantage of the examples he has given them of his wisdom and his infinite goodness, whereby he reveals himself as being not only wonderful, but also worthy of love beyond all things.