“There is a time coming,” said this good man, “when our warfare shall be accomplished, our views enlarged, and our light increased; then with what transports of adoration and love shall we look back upon the way by which the Lord led us! We shall then see and acknowledge that mercy and goodness directed every step; we shall see that what our ignorance once called adversities and evils, were in reality blessings which we could not have done well without; that nothing befell us without a cause, that no trouble came upon us sooner, or pressed us more heavily, or continued longer, than our case required: in a word that our many afflictions were each in their place, among the means employed by divine grace and wisdom, to bring us to the possession of that exceeding and eternal weight of glory which the Lord has prepared for his people. And even in this imperfect state, though we are seldom able to judge aright of our present circumstances, yet if we look upon the years of our past life, and compare the dispensations we have been brought through, with the frame of our minds under each successive period; if we consider how wonderfully one thing has been connected with another; so that what we now number amongst our greatest advantages, perhaps took their first rise from incidents which we thought hardly worth our notice; and that we have sometimes escaped the greatest dangers that threatened us, not by any wisdom or foresight of our own, but by the intervention of circumstances, which we neither desired nor thought of;—I say, when we compare and consider these things by the light afforded us in the Holy Scriptures, we may collect indisputable proof from the narrow circle of our own concerns, that the wise and good providence of God watches over his people from the earliest moment of their life, over-rules and guards them through all their wanderings in a state of ignorance, and leads them in a way they know not, till at length his providence and grace concur in those events and impressions which bring them to the knowledge of Him and themselves.” “All things are brought upon us by Nature and Fate,” says the unknown speculator who foisted his theology upon the world under the false name of Hermes Trismegistus: “and there is no place deserted by Providence. But Providence is the reason, perfect in itself, of super-celestial Deity. From it are the two known Powers, Necessity and Fate. Fate is the Minister of Providence and of Necessity; and the Stars are the ministers of Fate. And no one can fly from Fate, nor protect himself against its mighty force; for the Stars are the arms of Fate, and according to it all things are affected in Nature and in Men.” Take the passage in the Latin of Franciscus Patricius who produced these mystic treatises from the Ranzovian Library.