Centuries of Meditations

75

The Supreme Architect and our Everlasting Father, having made the world, this most glorious house and magnificent Temple of His divinity, by the secret laws of His hidden Wisdom; He adorned the regions above the heavens with most glorious spirits, the spheres he enlivened with Eternal Souls, the dreggy parts of the inferior world he filled with all kind of herds of living creatures. Sed Opere Consummato; but His work being completed, He desired some one that might weigh and reason, and love the beauty, and admire the vastness of so great a work. All things therefore being (as Moses and Timaeus witness) already finished, at last He thought of creating man. But there was not in all the platforms before conceived any being after whom He might form this new offspring. Nor in all His treasures what He might give this new son by way of inheritance, nor yet a place in all the regions of the world, wherein this contemplator of the universe might be seated. All things were already full; all things were already distributed into their various orders of supreme, middle and inferior. But it was not the part of infinite power to fail as defective in the last production; it was not the part of infinite wisdom, for want of council to fluctuate in so necessary an affair; it was not the part of infinite goodness or sovereign love, that he, who should be raised up to praise the Divine Bounty in other things, should condemn it in himself. Statuit tandem opt. Opifex, ut cui dari nihil proprium poterat commune esset, quod privatum singulis fuit: The wisest, and best of workmen appointed therefore, that he to whom nothing proper to himself could be added, should have something of all that was peculiar to everything, and therefore he took man, the Image of all His work, and placing him in the middle of the world, spake thus unto him,?