overing them, placing upon the surface of the earth signs of the
treasures hidden below; and yet do you say that you have received
no benefit? If a house were given you, bright with marble, its roof
beautifully painted with colours and gilding, you would call it no small
benefit. God has built for you a huge mansion that fears no fire or
ruin, in which you see no flimsy veneers, thinner than the very saw with
which they are cut, but vast blocks of most precious stone, all composed
of those various and different substances whose paltriest fragments you
admire so much; he has built a roof which glitters in one fashion by
day, and in another by night; and yet do you say that you have received
no benefit? When you so greatly prize what you possess, do you act the
part of an ungrateful man, and think that there is no one to whom you
are indebted for them? Whence comes the breath which you draw? the light
by which you arrange and perform all the actions of your life? the blood
by whose circulation your vital warmth is maintained? those meats
which excite your palate by their delicate flavour after your hunger is
appeased? those provocatives which rouse you when wearied with pleasure?
that repose in which you are rotting and mouldering? Will you not, if
you are grateful, say--

"'Tis to a god that this repose I owe,
For him I worship, as a god below.
Oft on his altar shall my firstlings bleed,
See, by his bounty here with rustic reed
I play the airs I love the livelong day,
The while my oxen round about me stray."

The true God is he who has placed, not a few oxen, but all the herds on
their pastures throughout the world; who furnishes food to the flocks
wherever they wander; who has ordained the alternation of summer and
winter pasturage, and has taught us not merely to play upon a reed, and
to reduce to some order a rustic and artless song, but who has invented
so many arts and varieties of voice, so many notes to make music,
some with our own breath, some with instruments. You cannot call our
inventions our own any more than you call our growth our own, or the
various bodily functions which correspond to each stage of our lives; at
one time comes the loss of childhood's teeth, at another, when our age
is advancing and growing into robuster manhood, puberty and the last
wisdom-tooth marks the end of our youth. "We have implanted in us the
seeds of all ages, of all arts, and God our master brings forth our