Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

een condemned to crawl. The just is an honest man, like Job. 1621 Wherefore God setteth
the solitary in families. 1622 So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable,
both small and great beasts. 1623 Yet a wise and marvellous order reigns among
these animals. Fish do not always deserve our reproaches; often they offer us useful examples.
How is it that each sort of fish, content with the region that has been assigned to it, never
travels over its own limits to pass into foreign seas? No surveyor has ever distributed to
them their habitations, nor enclosed them in walls, nor assigned limits to them; each kind
has been naturally assigned its own home. One gulf nourishes one kind of fish, another
other sorts; those which swarm here are absent elsewhere. No mountain raises its sharp
peaks between them; no rivers bar the passage to them; it is a law of nature, which according
to the needs of each kind, has allotted to them their dwelling places with equality and
justice. 1624
1621 So the Cod. Colb. and Eustathius, who renders Justus nihil habet fictum sicut Job. The Ben. Ed. suspect
that Basil wrote Jacob and Job. Four mss. support Jacob alone, who, whatever may be the meaning of the Hebrew
in Gen. xxv. 27, is certainly ἄπλαστος only in the LXX., and a bad instance of guilelessness.
1622 Ps. lxviii. 6.
1623 Ps. civ. 25.
The creation of moving creatures.
1624 cf. Cudworth, Int. Syst. iii. 37, 23: “Besides this plastick Nature which is in animals, forming their several
bodies artificially, as so many microcosms or little worlds, there must also be a general plastick Nature in the
macrocosm, the whole corporeal universe, that which makes all things thus to conspire everywhere, and agree
together into one harmony. Concerning which plastick nature of the universe, the Author De Mundo writes
after this manner, καὶ τὸν ὅλον κόσμον, διεκόσμησε μία ἡ διὰ πάντων διήκουσα δύναμις, one power, passing
through all things, ordered and formed the whole world. Again he calls the same πνεῦμα καὶ ἔμψυχον καὶ
γόνιμον οὐσίαν, a spirit, and a living and Generative Nature, and plainly declares it to be a thing distinct from
the Deity, but subordinate to it and dependent on it. But Aristotle himself, in that genuine work of his before
mentioned, speaks clearly and positively concerning the Plastick Nature of the Universe, as well as that of animals,
in these words: ‘It seemeth that as there is Art in Artificial things, so in the things of Nature, there is another
such like Principle or Cause, which we ourselves partake of: in the same manner as we do of Heat and Cold,
from the Universe. Wherefore it is more probable that the whole world was at first made by such a cause as this
(if at least it were made) and that it is still conserved by the same, than mortal animals should be so: for there
is much more of order and determinate Regularity in the Heavenly Bodies that in ourselves; but more of Fortu-
itousness and inconstant Regularity among these mortal things. Notwithstanding which, some there are, who
though they cannot but acknowledge that the Bodies of Animals were all framed by an Artificial Nature, yet
they will need contend that the System of the Heavens sprung merely from Fortune and Chance; although there
be not the least appearance of Fortuitousness or Temerity in it.’ And then he sums up all into this conclusion:
ὥστε εἶναι φανερὸν ὅτι ἔστι τι τοιοῦτον ὃ δὴ καὶ καλοῦμεν φύσιν. ‘Wherefore it is manifest that there is some
such thing as that which we call Nature,’ that is, that there is not only an ‘Artificial,’ ‘Methodical,’ and Plastick
Nature in Animals, by which their respective Bodies are Framed and Conserved, but also that there is such a
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