rty would drive him more desperately into crime. _His_ disorder
providence relieves by allowing him to amass money. Such a one, in the
uneasiness of a conscience stained with guilt, while he contrasts his
character with his fortune, perchance grows alarmed lest he should come
to mourn the loss of that whose possession is so pleasant to him. He
will, then, reform his ways, and through the fear of losing his fortune
he forsakes his iniquity. Some, through a prosperity unworthily borne,
have been hurled headlong to ruin; to some the power of the sword has
been committed, to the end that the good may be tried by discipline, and
the bad punished. For while there can be no peace between the righteous
and the wicked, neither can the wicked agree among themselves. How
should they, when each is at variance with himself, because his vices
rend his conscience, and ofttimes they do things which, when they are
done, they judge ought not to have been done. Hence it is that this
supreme providence brings to pass this notable marvel--that the bad make
the bad good. For some, when they see the injustice which they
themselves suffer at the hands of evil-doers, are inflamed with
detestation of the offenders, and, in the endeavour to be unlike those
whom they hate, return to the ways of virtue. It is the Divine power
alone to which things evil are also good, in that, by putting them to
suitable use, it bringeth them in the end to some good issue. For order
in some way or other embraceth all things, so that even that which has
departed from the appointed laws of the order, nevertheless falleth
within _an_ order, though _another_ order, that nothing in the realm of
providence may be left to haphazard. But

'"Hard were the task, as a god, to recount all, nothing omitting."

Nor, truly, is it lawful for man to compass in thought all the mechanism
of the Divine work, or set it forth in speech. Let us be content to
have apprehended this only--that God, the creator of universal nature,
likewise disposeth all things, and guides them to good; and while He
studies to preserve in likeness to Himself all that He has created, He
banishes all evil from the borders of His commonweal through the links
of fatal necessity. Whereby it comes to pass that, if thou look to
disposing providence, thou wilt nowhere find the evils which are
believed so to abound on earth.

'But I see thou hast long been burdened with the weight of the subject,
and fatigued w