Providence of God

We prize but little what we share only in common with the rest, or with the generality of our species.… The common benefits of our nature entirely escape us. Yet these are the great things. These constitute what most properly ought to be accounted blessings of Providence; what alone, if we might so speak, are worthy of its care. Nightly rest and daily bread, the ordinary use of our limbs, and senses, and understandings, are gifts which admit of no comparison with any other. Yet, because almost every man we meet with possesses these, we leave them out of our enumeration. They raise no sentiment; they move no gratitude. Now, herein, is our judgment perverted by our selfishness. A blessing ought in truth to be the more satisfactory, the bounty at least of the donor is rendered more conspicuous, by its very diffusion, its commonness, its cheapness; by its falling to the lot, and forming the happiness, of the great bulk and body of our species, as well as of ourselves.… It is in those things which are so common as to be no distinction, that the amplitude of the divine benignity is perceived.

To the divine providence it has seemed good to prepare in the world to come for the righteous good things, which the unrighteous will not enjoy; and for the wicked evil things, by which the good will not be tormented. But as for the good things of this life, and its ills, God has willed that these should be common to both, so that we might not too eagerly covet the things that wicked men are seen equally to enjoy, nor shrink with an unseemly fear from the ills that even good men often suffer. There is, too, a very great difference in the purpose served both by those events that we call adverse and those called prosperous. For the good man is neither uplifted with the good things of time, nor broken by its ills; but the wicked man, because he is corrupted by this world’s happiness, feels himself punished by its unhappiness.

We, therefore, both know and confess that God is without beginning, without end, eternal and everlasting, uncreated, unchangeable, invariable, simple, uncompound, incorporeal, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscribed, infinite, incognisable, indefinable, incomprehensible, good, just, maker of all things created, almighty, all-ruling, all-surveying, of all overseer, sovereign, judge; and that God is One, that is to say, one essence; and that He is known, and has His being in three subsistences, in Father, I say, and Son and Holy Spirit.