Three Pictures of the Word’s Rule

So that so great a matter may be understood by an example, let what we are describing be compared to a great choir. A choir is made up of different people: children, women too, old men, and those who are still young. When one person, the leader, gives the sign, each one sings according to his nature and power, the man as a man, the child as a child, the old man as an old man, and the young man as a young man, and yet all of them make up a single harmony. Or take our soul, which at one and the same moment moves our several senses, each according to its own proper work. When some one object is present, all of them alike are set in motion: the eye sees, the ear hears, the hand touches, the nose takes in the smell, and the palate tastes. And often the other parts of the body act too, as when the feet walk.

Or, to make our meaning plain by yet a third example, it is as though a very great city had been built and were governed in the presence of the ruler and king who built it. When he is present and gives orders and has his eye on everything, all obey. Some busy themselves with farming, others hurry to the aqueducts for water, another goes out to get provisions. One goes to the council chamber, another enters the assembly, the judge goes to the bench, and the magistrate to his court. The workman likewise settles to his craft, the sailor goes down to the sea, the carpenter to his workshop, the physician to his patients, the architect to his building. While one is going out to the country, another is coming back from it, and while some walk about the town, others are going out of the town and coming back to it again. But all this goes on, and is ordered, by the presence of the one ruler and by his management.

In the same way, then, we must think of the whole of creation, even though the example is inadequate, only with a larger idea. For at a single impulse, as it were at a nod, of the Word of God, all things at once fall into order, each does its proper work, and together they all make up a single order.