no one, however exalted, may think it unworthy of him to do what he
sees the wisdom of God the Father did.

O singular serenity of writing, to practise which the Artificer of the
world stoops down, at whose dread name every knee doth bow! O
venerable handicraft pre-eminent above all other crafts that are
practised by the hand of man, to which our Lord humbly inclines His
breast, to which the finger of God is applied, performing the office of
a pen! We do not read of the Son of God that He sowed or ploughed,
wove or digged; nor did any other of the mechanic arts befit the divine
wisdom incarnate except to trace letters in writing, that every
gentleman and sciolist may know that fingers are given by God to men
for the task of writing rather than for war. Wherefore we entirely
approve the judgment of books, wherein they declared in our sixth
chapter the clerk who cannot write to be as it were disabled.

God himself inscribes the just in the book of the living; Moses
received the tables of stone written with the finger of God. Job
desires that he himself that judgeth would write a book. Belshazzar
trembled when he saw the fingers of a man's hand writing upon the wall,
Mene tekel phares. I wrote, says Jeremiah, with ink in the book.
Christ bids his beloved disciple John, What thou seest write in a book.
So the office of the writer is enjoined on Isaiah and on Joshua, that
the act and skill of writing may be commended to future generations.
Christ Himself has written on His vesture and on His thigh King of
Kings and Lord of Lords, so that without writing the royal ornaments of
the Omnipotent cannot be made perfect. Being dead they cease not to
teach, who write books of sacred learning. Paul did more for building
up the fabric of the Church by writing his holy epistles, than by
preaching by word of mouth to Jews and Gentiles. He who has attained
the prize continues daily by books, what he long ago began while a
sojourner upon the earth; and thus is fulfilled in the doctors writing
books the saying of the Prophet: They that turn many to righteousness
shall be as the stars for ever and ever.

Moreover, it has been determined by the doctors of the Church that the
longevity of the ancients, before God destroyed the original world by
the Deluge, is to be ascribed to a miracle and not to nature; as though
God granted to them such length of days as was required for finding out
the sciences and writing them in books; among