LXXXIX. I can with truth say of myself, that next to the divine grace, a conviction of my own ignorance with regard to natural things, is the most powerful weapon I could ever discover, wherewith to overcome all those difficulties or objections, which natural reason suggests, against the mysteries of faith. I often say to myself, good God! how can I understand those wonders, which by using his extraordinary power, are wrought by the omnipotent hand, if I cannot comprehend, the common effects of his ordinary power? It is true, I am ignorant how, or by what means, a divine person can unite himself to human nature; but I am also ignorant, how a spiritual soul can be united to a material body. Notwithstanding which, this is a matter of fact, and happens within myself. Neither do I perceive, how the same water which falls from heaven, should be converted, not only into here and there a particular body, but into all the animal and vegetable substances upon earth. In the most plausible part of theological controversy, I find myself exceedingly embarrassed; for if I take the side of providence, I am assailed with the forcible arguments in favour of liberty; and if I put myself on the side of liberty, they wage powerful war against me with the arguments in favour of providence. But do not I see the same arguments, urged with greater vehemence, in the vulgar philosophical controversy respecting the composition and unity of universal space, in which, whatever sentiment is maintained, they instead of answering their opponents arguments, perplex the dispute with a multiplicity of words? If I defend, with Aristotle, the infinite divisibility of universal space, although to avoid being concluded, I don’t do it with my mouth, I cannot in my mind, help acknowledging the unity of a great number of its parts; and if with Zeno I acquiesce in the indivisibility, the mathematical arguments derived from the diagonal of a square, two concentric wheels united, and many other principles, not only leave me without an answer, but in a manner strike me dumb. XC. I say again, if in those natural things that are open to our view, and which we touch with our hands every day, there occur a thousand difficulties, that are insuperable to, and beyond the reach of our understandings, have we not the greatest reason to suppose, that the same thing happens with respect to supernatural matters, they being totally superior to the sphere of our senses? If, maugre all my prying, I can’t perceive how God does an infinite number of things, which I see him do every day, would it not be madness in me, to deny or to doubt the existence of revealed things, only because I can’t descry how God executes those things?