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But law means order; and universal law means order in great things as well as small. It is an order deriving immediately from the intimate tendencies innate in natural things; an order that nothing can create by itself or give of itself to itself, as no being can give itself to itself; an order that signifies the Order of Reason in a Spirit which has created the universe and on which ‘depend Heaven and the whole of nature’; 4 an order which those tendencies and energies received as they came into being and through which both collaborate for a well-ordered world. This marvellous assemblage of natural laws, which the human spirit, with tireless observation and accurate study, discovered, adding victories upon victories over the occult resistances of the forces of nature, what else is it but an image, through pale and imperfect, of the great idea and of the great divine design, which in the mind of God the Creator is conceived as a law of this universe since the days of His eternity? Then, in the inexhaustible thinking of His wisdom, He prepared the heavens and the earth, and then, creating the light on the abysses of chaos, cradle of the universe also created by Him, He gave a beginning to motion and to the flight of time and of centuries, and called into being, into life and activity, all things according to their species and their kind, to the most imponderable atom. How rightly every intellect which contemplates and penetrates the heavens and weighs the stars and earth should exclaim, turning to God: Omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti 5 (‘You have disposed everything in measure and number and weight’). Do you not feel, within your souls, that the firmament which enwraps us and the globe which we tread narrate together with your telescopes, with your microscopes, with your scales, with your rules, with your multiform devices, the glory of God, and reflect, as you look, a ray of that uncreated wisdom which attingit a fine usque ad finem fortiter, et disponit omnia suaviter?6 (‘Reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other and disposes all things well’).

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