mous _City of God_. The
whole of history is a revelation of the divine purpose which is
eventually to be fulfilled. Orosius, again, a disciple of Augustine,
wrote his _Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans_ to
prove the abundance of calamities which had afflicted mankind
before the birth of Christ. He gathers together all the
evidence he can to exhibit at once the patience and the power
of God. "Straitened and anxious minds" might not be able
to see the purpose always, but all was ordained for one end.
Thus he writes at the beginning of his seventh book:

The human race from the beginning was so created and appointed
that living under religion with peace without labor, by the fruit of
obedience it might merit eternity; but it abused the Creator's goodness,
turned liberty into wilful license, and through disdain fell into
forgetfulness; now the patience of God is just and doubly just, operating
that this disdain might not wholly ruin those whom He wished
to spare ... and also so that He might always hold out guidance
although to an ignorant creature, to whom if penitent He would
mercifully restore the means to grace.[1]

[Footnote 1: Orosius: _Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans_, II, 3.]

History thus comes to reveal the fulfillment of the divine
purpose, as science reveals the divine arrangements of the
universe.

It has already been noted that theology, certainly Christian
theology, maintains that God is all-good. In consequence the
natural world which scientific inquiry reveals must be all-good
in its operations and its fruits. The history of the universe
must be a steady and unfaltering fulfillment of the
divine, of the beneficent eternal purpose. The ways of the
Almighty, so theology tells us, are just ways, and the universe
in which we live, so theology tells us, is a revelation of
that justice. The eighteenth century "natural theologians"
spent much energy in demonstrating how perfectly adapted to
his needs are man's natural environment and his organic structure.
They pointed to the eye with its delicate membranes
so subtly adapted to the function of sight. All Nature was
a continuous and magnificent revelation of God's designs,
which were good. Christian Wolff, for example, a rationalistic
theologian of the late eighteenth century, writes:

God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the
earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may
inhabit its surface.