substitutes "order" for "weight."
Book I 55
But when they say things like that, they are failing to understand how all these things are beautiful to their maker and craftsman, who has a use for them all in his management of the whole universe which is under the control of his sover eign law. After all, if a layman enters a mechanic's workshop, he will see many instruments there whose purpose he is ignorant of, and which, if he is more than usually silly, he thinks are superfluous. What's more, if he carelessly tumbles into the furnace, or cuts himself on a sharp steel implement when he handles it wrongly, then he reckons that there are many pernicious and harmful things there too. The mechanic, however, who knows the use of everything there, has a good laugh at his silliness, takes no notice of his inept remarks, and just presses on with the work in hand.
And yet people are so astonishingly foolish, that with a human craftsman they won't dream of objecting to things whose function they are ignorant of, but will assume when they notice them that they are necessary, and put there for various uses, and yet will have the audacity, looking round this world ofwhich God is the acknowledged founder and administrator, to find fault with many things which they cannot see the point of, because they wish to appear knowledgeable about the works and the tools of the almighty craftsmen when in fact they know nothing about it at all.
26. 1, however, must confess that I have not the slightest idea why mice and frogs were created, and flies and worms; yet I can still see that they are all beau tiful in their own specific kind, although because of our sins many of them seem to be against our interests. There is not a single living creature, after all, in whose body I will not find, when I reflect upon it, that its measures and numbers and order18 are geared to a harmonious unity. Where these should all come from l cannot conceive, unless it be from the supreme measure and number and order which are identical with the unchanging and eternal sublimity of God himself. If these insufferably talkative and wrongheaded people would just stop to think about this for a moment, they wouldn't go on boring us to death, but by reflecting themselves on all such beauties from the highest to the lowest would in all cases praise God the craftsman; and since none of these things is offensive to reason, then wherever our carnal senses are offended, they would put it down to what is due to our mortality, not to anything wrong with the things themselves.
Yes, of course all living creatures are either useful to us, or pernicious or superfluous. Against the useful ones they have nothing to say. Those that are pernicious are either to punish us or to put us through our paces or to frighten us, so that instead of loving and desiring this life, subject to so many dangers and trials, we should set our hearts on another better one, where there is total freedom
18. See Wis 1 1:20: You have arranged all things in measure and number and weight; here he substitutes "order" for "weight."