large a table, may also be accepted in place of a better reason.

The examples of divine providence, everywhere found (the first divine
histories being nothing else but a continuation of such examples) have
persuaded me to fetch my beginning from the beginning of all things:
to wit, Creation. For though these two glorious actions of the
Almighty be so near, and (as it were) linked together, that the one
necessarily implieth the other: Creation inferring Providence (for
what father forsaketh the child that he hath begotten?) and Providence
pre-supposing Creation: yet many of those that have seemed to excel in
worldly wisdom, have gone about to disjoin this coherence; the epicure
denying both Creation and Providence, but granting the world had a
beginning; the Aristotelian granting Providence, but denying both the
creation and the beginning.

Now although this doctrine of faith, touching the creation in time
(for by faith we understand, that the world was made by the word of
God), be too weighty a work for Aristotle's rotten ground to bear
up, upon which he hath (notwithstanding) founded the defences and
fortresses of all his verbal doctrine: yet that the necessity of
infinite power, and the world's beginning, and the impossibility
of the contrary even in the judgment of natural reason, wherein he
believed, had not better informed him; it is greatly to be marvelled
at. And it is no less strange, that those men which are desirous of
knowledge (seeing Aristotle hath failed in this main point; and taught
little other than terms in the rest) have so retrenched their
minds from the following and overtaking of truth, and so absolutely
subjected themselves to the law of those philosophical principles;
as all contrary kind of teaching, in the search of causes, they have
condemned either for phantastical, or curious. Both doth it follow,