The Essential Augustine
achieved by obeying the commandments which have to do with proper living
THE UNIVERSALITY OF PROVIDENCE*
Therefore God supreme and true, with His Word 11. and Holy Spirit (which three are one), one God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and of every body; by whose gift all are happy who are happy through verity and not through vanity; who made man a rational animal consisting of soul and body; who, when he sinned, neither permitted him to go unpunished, nor left him without mercy; who has given to the good and to the evil, being in common with stones, vegetable life in common with trees, sensuous life in common with brutes, intellectual life in common with angels alone; from whom is every mode, every species, every order; from whom are _measure, number, weight; from whom is everything which has an existence in nature, of whatever kind it be, and of whatever value; from whom are the seeds of forms and the forms of seeds, and the motion of seeds and of forms; who gave also to flesh its origin, beauty, health, reproductive fecundity, disposition of members, and the salutary concord of its parts; who also to the irrational soul has given memory, sense, appetite, but to the rational soul, in addition to these, has given intelligence and will; who has not left, not to speak of heaven and earth, angels and men, but not even the entrails of the smallest and most contemptible animal, or the feather of 'a bird or the little flower of a plant or the leaf of a tree without a harmony and as it were a mutual peace among all its parts —that God can never be believed to have left the kingdoms of men, their dominations and servitudes, outside of the laws of His providence.
MEANING IN HISTORY +
If as yet we cannot bring ourselves to cling to the 50.98. things of eternity, at least let us reprove our phantasms and remove from the looking glass of our
City of God, V, 11; trans. Dods. t The True Religion, 50.98-99; trans. W. G. Renn, S.J., De vera religione (chapters 39-55) (St. Louis University Master's Thesis, 1947), pp. 79-83. Used with permission.