Well may Hooker speculate on what would become of man, were Nature to intermit her course, and leave altogether, though but for a while, the observation of her own laws; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it were through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture—“See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of Nature is the stay of the whole world?” Again to quote from “The Mystery of Evil,” the same star-gazer speaking:—
“Do I not climb in you, O blessèd host,
The way of symbols, shining steps to God?
When most man knows you, he is certain most
One law unswerving reigns from star to clod.”
“Of law,” says Hooker, at the close of his first book of Ecclesiastical Polity, with an eloquence which has ever been most admired by the most admirable masters of English prose,—“Of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power: both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” Considering when he wrote, what he wrote, and to what purpose and in what spirit he wrote, there seems to us a beautiful consistency in Richard Hooker’s deathbed meditations, as related in the familiar memoir by Izaak Walton. Found by his trustiest visitor, “deep in contemplation, and not inclinable to discourse,” and asked what was the subject of his present thoughts, he replied, “That he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which, peace could not be in heaven; and oh, that it might be so on earth!”
There is not, affirms a modern divine, a corner of the world, nor a process of nature, nor a piece of God’s handiwork of any kind whatever, on which His love of order is not written with a plainness not to be mistaken. “System and method, law and order, symmetry and punctuality, are conspicuous everywhere; indicating at once the value attached to these things in the mind of God, and his dislike for their opposites—confusion, fitfulness, irregularity.” Nor is the Divine love of order a quality that ever leads to stiffness, formality, or monotony; for it is shown to be constantly associated with beauty, variety, and freedom.
M. Jules Simon interpolates into his argument for the vast preponderance of good over evil in the world, a casually expressed identification of good with order: “le bien, c’est-à-dire, l’ordre, car dans le monde le bien et l’ordre ne font qu’un.”
“Some think Disorder means God’s moral plan;