God, just as to see rightly is to see in God. All morality, into the
details of which we will not enter, evolves from the love of order. The
universe is a vast mechanism, as was stated by Descartes, set in motion and
directed by God--that is to say, by the laws established by God; for God
acts only by general dispositions (which are laws) and not by particular
dispositions. In other words, there exists a will, but there are no
volitions.

MIRACLES.--But then you will say there are no miracles; for miracle
is precisely a particular will traversing and interrupting the general
will.

To begin with, there are very few miracles, which therefore permits order
to subsist; it would be only if there were incessant miracles that order
would be non-existent. Next, a miracle is a warning God gives to men
because of their weakness, to remind them that behind the laws there is a
Lawgiver, behind the general dispositions a Being who disposes. Because of
their intellectual weakness, if they never saw any derogation from the
general laws they would take them to be fatalities. A miracle is a grace
intervening in things, just as grace properly so-called intervenes in human
actions. And it is not contradictory to the general design of God, since
by bringing human minds back to the truth that there is a Being who wills,
it accustoms them to consider all general laws as permanent acts, but also
as the acts of the Being who wills. The miracle has the virtue of making
everything in the world miraculous, which is true. Hence the miracle
confirms the idea of order. Therein, perhaps alone, the exception proves
the rule.

SPINOZA.--Spinoza, who during his life was a pure Stoic and the
purest of Stoics, polishing the lenses of astronomical telescopes in order