Men are accustomed to call that knowledge divine which surpasses the human understanding, and that event miraculous when the cause is unknown to them; and nothing better demonstrates to them the existence of God, His power and His providence, than those things which appear to them to change the order of nature. We sometimes show our ignorance by attributing things of which we are ignorant to a special interposition of providence. Those who think thus are not in a position to explain what they mean by the order of nature. This manner of viewing things might well date from the time of the early Hebrews, who wished to prove to those nations who were not Semitic, and who worshipped visible objects, such as the heavenly bodies, that these were subordinate deities, subject to the will of the invisible God, whose miracles on their behalf they related, since they were convinced that the whole of nature contributed to the well-being of the Hebrew people exclusively. With God the understanding and the will are the same; to know and to will is a single act; to know an object as it is in itself, and to realise it effectively, is a necessity inherent in the Divine perfection; since all truths come inevitably from the Divine intellect, the universal laws of nature are the eternal decrees of God. If any event takes place in nature not in accordance with these universal laws, then the mind of God has not conceived it; in other words, he who affirms that in a certain case God has acted contrarily to the laws of nature, affirms also that God has acted contrarily to His own Divine nature, which would prove the speaker’s perversity. No event happens that is not by the will and eternal decrees of God, each event conforms to laws eternally necessary and absolutely true. To believe that this could be otherwise would be to admit that God made an imperfect nature, and established laws so incomplete that they required to be retouched each time that they failed to realise the divine plan, a strange conception, and for which there is no necessity. Those who seek and find their supreme happiness in the love of God, and in doing the greatest good, have no wish that nature should obey them; they desire to submit to nature, knowing indubitably, that God governs all things in accordance with general laws which are in agreement with universal life.