3. Submit to providence. It is God's right to govern the world, and
he should degrade his wisdom to the wrong bias of your blind reason?
3. Submit to providence. It is God's right to govern the world, and dispose of his creature; it is his glory in heaven to do what he will: Ps.
115:3, 'But our God is in the heaven: he hath done whatsoever he pleased.' Let us not, by our unsubmissive carriage, deprive him of the same glory on earth; he brings to pass his will by ways the creature cannot understand. It is the wisest speech in the medley of fooleries, the Turkish Alcoran.* We must walk by the rule of reason which God hath placed in us for our guide; yet if providence brings to pass any other event contrary to our rational expectations, because it is a clear evidence of his will, we must acquiesce. As when a traveller hath two ways to come to his journey's end, the one safe and the other dangerous, reason persuades him to choose the safest way, wherein he falls among thieves; now having used his reason, which in that case was to be his director, he must acquiesce; God's providence bringeth forth an event, which he could not without violence to his reason avoid. And therefore it is a great vanity, when a man hath resolved the most probable way in a business, and fails in it, to torment himself; because though our consultations depend upon ourselves, yet the issues of them are solely in the hand of God. It concerns us therefore to submit to God's disposal of us and our affairs, since nothing can come to pass but by the will of God effecting it, or permitting it. If the fall of a sparrow is not without his will, Mat. 10:29, much less can the greater events which befall men, the nobler creatures, be without the same concurrence of God's pleasure; therefore submit: for, (1.) Whatsoever God doth, he doth wisely. His acts are not sudden and rash, but acts of counsel; not taken up upon the present posture of things, but the resolves of eternity. As his is the highest wisdom, so all his acts relish of it, and he guides his will by counsel: Eph. 1:11,
'Who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.' If God took counsel in creating the world, much more in laying a platform of government, much more in the act of government; for men can