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surpassing wisdom; it is little to be believed that God would have
promised Solomon, for his greater happiness, that He would never endow
any one with so much wisdom in time to come; this would in no wise have
increased Solomon's intellect, and the wise king would have given equal
thanks to the Lord if every one had been gifted with the same faculties.

Still, though we assert that Moses, in the passages of the Pentateuch
just cited, spoke only according to the understanding of the Hebrews, we
have no wish to deny that God ordained the Mosaic law for them alone,
nor that He spoke to them alone, nor that they witnessed marvels beyond
those which happened to any other nation; but we wish to emphasize that
Moses desired to admonish the Hebrews in such a manner and with such
reasonings as would appeal most forcibly to their childish
understanding and constrain them to worship the Deity. Further, we
wished to show that the Hebrews did not surpass other nations in
knowledge, or in piety, but evidently in some attribute different from
these; or (to speak like the Scriptures, according to their
understanding), that the Hebrews were not chosen by God before others
for the sake of the true life and sublime ideas, though they were often
thereto admonished, but with some other object. What that object was I
will duly show.

But before I begin, I wish in a few words to explain what I mean by the
guidance of God, by the help of God, external and inward, and lastly,
what I understand by fortune.

By the help of God, I mean the fixed and unchangeable order of nature or
the chain of natural events: for I have said before and shown elsewhere
that the universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist
and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of
God, which always involve eternal truth and necessity.

So that to say that everything happens according to natural laws, and to
say that everything is ordained by the decree and ordinance of God, is
the same thing. Now since the power in Nature is identical with the
power of God, by which alone all things happen and are determined, it
follows that whatsoever man, as a part of Nature, provides himself with
to aid and preserve his existence, or whatsoever Nature affords him
without his help, is given to him solely by the Divine power, acting
either through human nature or through external circumstance. So
whatever human nature can furnish itself with by its