Divine Conduct, or The Mystery of Providence

The rare structure and excellent composition §1of the body;¹ I am wonderfully made; that word Ru•hampti—is very full. The Vulgar renders it, painted as with a needle, (i. e.) richly embroidered with nerves and veins. Oh the curious workmanship that is in that one part the eye! How hath it forced some to acknowledge a God upon the examination of it! Providence, when it went about this work, had its model or pattern before it, according to which it moulded every part, as it is, Ver. 16. In thy Book were all my members written. Hast thou an integral perfection and fullness of members? It is because he wrote them all in his Book, or limned out thy ⟨p. 36⟩body, according to that exact model which he drew of thee in his own gracious purpose, before thou hadst a being: Had an eye, an ear, a hand, a foot been wanting in the platform, thou hadst now been sadly sensible of the defect: this world had been but a dungeon to thee, without those windows: thou hadst lived, as many do, an object of pity to others: if thou have low thoughts of this mercy, ask the blind, the deaf, the lame and the dumb, the value and worth of those mercies, and they will tell thee. There is a world of cost bestowed upon thy very body. Thou mightest have been cast into another mould,² and created a Worm or a Toad. I remember Luther tells us of two Cardinals, riding in great pomp to the Council of Constance, and by the way they heard a man in the fields bitterly weeping and wailing: when they came to him, they found him intently viewing an ugly Toad; and asking him, why he wept so bitterly, he told them, his heart was melted with this consideration, that God had not made him such a loathsome and deformed Creature; hoc est quod amarè fleo, said he: whereupon one of them cries out, Well said the Father, Surgunt indocti, & rapJent Coelum, The unlearned will rise and take Heaven, and we with all our learning shall be cast into Hell. No part of the Common lump was so figured and polished as man is. Galen gave Epicurus an hundred years time to imagine ⟨p. 37⟩a more commodious situation, configuration, or composition of any one member of a humane body. And if all the Angels had studied to this day, they could not have cast the body of man into a more curious mould.