ll that is in the world."[837] He is also the
gracious Providence which cares for the individual as well as for the
whole; and he is the author of that natural law which commands the good
and prohibits the bad. "He made men to this end that they might be
happy; as becomes his fatherly care of us, he placed our good and evil
in those things which are in our own power."[838] The Providence and
Fatherhood of God are strikingly presented in the "Hymn of Cleanthes" to
Jupiter--

[Footnote 837: Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of the Philosophers," bk. vii.
ch. lxxii.]

[Footnote 838: Marcus Aurelius, bk. iii. ch. xxiv.]

Most glorious of the immortal Powers above!
O thou of many names! mysterious Jove:
For evermore almighty! Nature's source!
Thou governest all things in their order'd course!
All hail to thee! since, innocent of blame,
E'en mortal creatures may address thy name;
For all that breathe, and creep the lowly earth,
Echo thy being with reflected birth--
Thee will I sing, thy strength for aye resound:
The universe, that rolls this globe around,
Moves wheresoe'er thy plastic influence guides,
And, ductile, owns the god whose arm presides.
The lightnings are thy ministers of ire;
The double-forked and ever-living fire;
In thy unconquerable hands they glow,
And at the flash all nature quakes below.
Thus, thunder-armed, thou dost creation draw
To one immense, inevitable law:
And, with the various mass of breathing souls,
Thy power is mingled, and thy spirit rolls.
Dread genius of creation! all things bow
To thee: the universal monarch thou!

Nor aught is done without thy wise control,
On earth, or sea, or round the ethereal pole,
Save when the wicked, in their frenzy blind,
Act o'er the follies of a senseless mind,
Thou curb'st th' excess; confusion, to thy sight,
Moves regular; th' unlovely scene is bright.
Thy hand, educing good from evil, brings
To one apt harmony the strife of things.
One ever-during law still binds the whole,
Though shunned, resisted, by the sinner's soul.
Wretches! while still they course the glittering prize
The law of God eludes their ears and eyes.
Life, then, were virtue, did they thus obey;
But wide from life's chief good they headlong stray.
Now glory's arduous toils the breast inflame;
Now avaric