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THE ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN
THE SOCIAL ORDER

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THE ROLE OF PROVIDENCE
IN THE SOCIAL ORDER
AN ESSAY IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

JACOB YINER

Jayne Lectures for 1966
The American Philosophical Society

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © 1972 by The American Philosophical Society
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey
LCC 72-184168
ISBN 0-691-01990-8
Printed in the United States of America
First PRINCETON PAPERBACK Printing, 1976
The essays in this book were originally presented as the
1966 Jayne Lectures of The American Philosophical Society.
They were subsequently published as Volume 90 of the
Memoirs of the Society. A clothbound edition is available
from The American Philosophical Society, 104 South Fifth
Street, Philadelphia, Pa., 19106.

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Contents
PAGE

Foreword by Joseph R. Strayer

vii

I. The Cosmic Order in the Service of Man

1

II. The Providential Elements in the Commerce of Nations. . . 27
III. The Invisible Hand and Economic Man

55

IV. The Providential Origin of Social Inequality

86

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Foreword
In 1966 Professor Viner was invited to give the Jayne
Lectures of the American Philosophical Society. He had
long been interested in the relationship between religious
doctrines and economic theory and behavior, and in these
lectures he presented some of the conclusions that he had
reached after years of thoughtful study. He concerned
himself especially with the way in which the idea of provi­
dence was used to justify existing economic and social con­
ditions. Providence favors trade among peoples in order to
promote universal brotherhood; providence also creates
social in; equality because it is part of the divine plan. These
and other ideas he discussed with his usual wit and learn­
ing. But lectures are subject to time limitations and Pro­
fessor Viner could cite only small fragments of the vast
body of material that he had accumulated to support his
conclusions. He therefore planned to expand the lectures
into a longer book and to add the footnotes that would have
illustrated the peculiar and unexpected combinations of
religious and economic doctrine that appear during the
centuries. He spent a great deal of time on this work, but
increasing ill-health forced him to slow down his activities.
He died in 1970 with the book still incomplete.
We are all the losers by this incompleteness. Everyone
who knew Jacob Viner remembers his extraordinary knowl­
edge of books, his ability to find striking ideas in the most
unlikely places, his mastery of many fields besides his own.
He knew more history than many historians and he de­
lighted in giving new twists to the history of economic
thought. The complete book would have touched off a long
series of articles and doctoral dissertations.
But we would be equally the losers if the lectures were
not published at all. They do distill the results of long and
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viii

FOREWORD

thorough research; they do present ideas that Viner wanted
us to discuss. They are incomplete only in the sense of
being less inclusive and less well documented than the
author wanted them to be. In themselves they are a finished
and a polished piece of writing. A master has stated his
conclusions; it will be profitable for us to seek his sources
and to try to retrace his reasoning.
JOSEPH R. STRAYER

Princeton University

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THE ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN
THE SOCIAL ORDER

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I. The Cosmic Order in the Service of Man

I

AM PRESENTING these lectures to you as merely an exer­

cise in the history of ideas. The particular set of ideas which
I will examine relates to the role of providence in the social
order as seen, primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, by intellectuals in general, and by theologians,
philosophers of various species, and economists in particu­
lar. Some of these ideas no doubt had a substantial influ­
ence on the course of history in these centuries, but as to
this I venture no claims. It has been said of the ideas of
political philosophers and economists that almost on their
own they have ruled the world. Perhaps so. In any case, I
have a professional vested interest in believing it to be so.
But most of the thinkers I will be dealing with in these
lectures would have regarded as impious the idea that the
ideas of men, even of men as important as themselves,
ruled the world as a final cause. They would have insisted,
instead, that it was providence that ruled the world. For
the moment, I will defer paying my respects to the role
of providence and look only at secondary causes.
There is a theory, which is a quasi-religion for some men
and is regarded by perhaps a majority of modern intel­
lectuals as having a large measure of validity, which holds
that it is the material circumstances in which men live, and
especially the social structure and economic institutions of
society which govern the behavior of men, and via practice,
shape their thought, including even their thoughts about
providence. Karl Marx, in 1843, applied this thesis to reli­
gion in his most dogmatic manner: "religious misery is, on
one hand, the expression of actual misery, and, on the other,
a protest against actual misery. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the kindliness of a heartless world, the
spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the people's opium."
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

A rival theory is that it is the great men who determine
the course of history, the men of action in the material
world, the great thinkers in the world of ideas. It is, I
suppose, the responsibility of social historians to decide
between the competing theories as to the causes and con­
sequences of the ideas which men hold. In any case, as I
am not a social historian, I do not accept it as an immediate
responsibility of mine, and I will endeavor to remain strictly
within the narrow and modest sphere of the history of ideas.
This, as I understand it, accepts no responsibilities except
those imposed by the standards of scholarly objectivity,
whose essence can be summarized in two precepts: first,
be as neutral as you can in reporting other men's ideas,
yielding neither to favorable nor to unfavorable bias, nor
to unmotivated carelessness; second, bear in mind that this,
even an approach to accuracy in reporting, is an arduous
and difficult art, calling for unintermitting self-discipline.
Objectivity is not an all-purpose virtue. One can, I sup­
pose, pay a higher price for it in surrendered values than it
is worth in some circumstances. As it operates in the history
of ideas it can result in a lifeless, bloodless, anaemic aca­
demic discipline, one which isolates ideas from human
minds and passions and treats them as a species of intel­
lectual atoms, as particles of thought which emerged from
nothingness and will return to it, causeless and devoid of
consequences. It may have no function except that of pro­
viding the historian with a vacation from true history of
man's thought or providing him with a vocation which
furnishes him with subsistence and occasional fun, but
leaves him free from the need of making moral or religious
or political or economic judgments as part of his profes­
sional task. It would be libelous to assert that this is a fair
account of how in fact most historians of ideas operate.
With minor qualifications, however, I confess that it comes
reasonably close to how I have tried to operate when I have
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

3

practiced the art of Ideengeschichte. In the past I have for
the most part been otherwise engaged, in trying to generate
ideas of my own, or to improve the morals of others, or
either to help rescue contemporary society from the sad
cultural predicament I am told it is in, or to protect society
from its would-be rescuers, or to solve technical economic
problems. The only assistance I was then conscious of
deriving from such knowledge as I had of the history of
ideas was a lesson it taught me with a very close approach
to certainty. Outside the quite extensive area where tautol­
ogy rightly rules, certainty is beyond the reach of man, but
for effectiveness in the life of action the false assurance that
one has attained certainty is easy to achieve and is a great
help and a great comfort.
It is possible however, to make more of the history of
ideas than the mechanical compilation of annals or chron­
icles of autonomous ideas, all free, equal, and of no visible
interest except to those perhaps mythical scholars, the oldfashioned antiquarians. In relation to the outside world,
including the spheres of thought which use as raw ma­
terial particular ideas, there are many kinds of ideas and,
with effort, the kinds can in practice be distinguished more
or less precisely from each other. Depending upon time
and place, also, the same idea may be performing in differ­
ent roles. Given the appropriate knowledge, the observer
may be able in any particular set of circumstances to
identify the role which is dominant for a particular idea,
and thus relate the idea to the thought, the doctrines, the
passions and hopes, the material circumstances, of man­
kind in that time and place. The idea may be operating
functionally, that is, it may be influencing the behavior of
those who are possessed of or by it, and thus may have
practical consequences. The idea may find use only as a
part of traditional rote, not related logically to its intel­
lectual context, and now playing only a ceremonial role as
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4

ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

a residue of the functional thought of a distant past. The
idea may have an aesthetic role, as decoration or orna­
mentation for an argument or thesis, or as raw material
for the poet or dramatist. The idea may be an implement
of play, the tennis-ball, so to speak, of an intellectual game
which can have strict rules designed to provide standards
of skill for players and spectators. Finally, the idea, though
dead and functionless, may be an object of innocent curios­
ity, like uncommon pebbles or ancient artifacts which offer
scope for the acquisition of connoisseurship. It is on the
basis of some blend of these roles that I accept the history
of ideas as a legitimate avocation for myself, but I hope that
my audience, with its wider range of skills and interests,
and no doubt its more profound convictions, will find in
these lectures more solid justification for listening to them
than I have the presumption to claim on their behalf.
Providence, as an intelligent being, external to nature but
governing nature, is an idea common to most religions. The
term, or its equivalent in various languages, is often used
also to signify the pattern in which that supernatural being
conducts his operations. I will use it in both senses.
In the Christian tradition, especially perhaps in the
period I am in these lectures specially concerned with, the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a distinction is made
on the one hand between "general providence," or God
operating through secondary causes, or through the "laws
of nature," and on the other hand, "particular" or "peculiar"
or "special" or "extraordinary" providence, or God operat­
ing directly, either in a special manipulation of the laws of
nature, or without reference to the laws of nature, or in
direct suppression of them. Somewhere within the range of
"particular providence," but not as a rule regarded as em­
bracing its whole range, come "miracles." "Secondary
causes" signify the operation of the laws of nature. "Final
causes" signify the operations of providence, whether diBrought to you by | UT Southwestern Medical Center Library Dallas
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

5

rect, without the mediation of the laws of nature, or in­
direct, with the mediation of these laws. All causation is
thus immediately or ultimately final, except where there is
recognized to be a field of operations for the devil, for
demons, for false gods, and for witches, sorcerers, evil
spirits, and magicians, all these last regarded as agents of
the devil.
My particular concern in these lectures is with ideas con­
cerning the role of providence in the temporal social order
of mankind. Expressly or by implication in the JudeoChristian Scriptures, as also in the religious thought of
ancient Greece and Rome, there is a special relationship be­
tween providence and this earth, and between providence
and the human inhabitants of this earth, or of a portion of
them, a chosen people, or the portion of mankind which a
special revelation has reached, or the faithful among the
latter. A good deal of early theological doctrine, Christian
and non-Christian, however, was not expressly anthropocentric, or not exclusively so, and was concerned with the
relations of providence to the universe as a whole, to this
earth as a whole, and to all of its organic life. It was in
this area where, by virtue of new observations and dis­
coveries, apparent discrepancies between Biblical texts and
observed or reasonably inferrable facts first became impor­
tant. The first stages of providential doctrine, therefore,
gave extensive attention to the relations of providence to the
cosmic order, to the physical order. Social thought was
primitive and scanty, and while Christianity continued to
be a minority and a persecuted cult, without a share in
government, it concentrated its thought about humanity on
the relations of the indivdual to God and on the City of God
which was in prospect, rather than on the problems of com­
munal life in the earthly cities of sinful men.
The general framework of providentialist doctrine thus
was set initially largely in terms of the relation of God to the
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6

ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

physical order of the cosmos he had created, and on the
path to immortal life he had established for mankind. Ad­
miration of the beauties, the regularities, and the mag­
nificence of the cosmic order was primarily a religious act,
an act of veneration of God's majesty, and not, as it later
sometimes became, an expression of gratitude for temporal
benefits which mankind in general derived from the cosmic
order.
In the state of knowledge of nature of the early Chris­
tians, the account of the cosmic order derivable from Gene­
sis did not conflict with what their naked and untrained
eyes could perceive, and presumably left most of them
untroubled by doubts as to the reliability of that account.
St. Augustine, however, warned the Christians of his time
not to make themselves laughable to sophisticated Greeks
by presenting their naive notions about matters of fact
relating to natural science as resting on the sacred writings
when to the Greeks such notions were in direct conflict with
propositions which they regarded as demonstrably true on
the basis of reason and experience. St. Augustine's primary
concern was apparently not to improve the understanding
of nature by rank-and-file Christians. Nor is it at all clear
that he was conceding that Genesis, properly interpreted,
could not be reconciled with the latest findings of Greek
science. He did, however, make it reasonably clear that
he believed that Genesis was not to be read literally as a
reliable treatise on scientific matters. Christians, he said,
should be prudent, restrained, and if possible well-informed
in using the Scriptures for exposition of matters on which
scientific testimony was relevant and available; if they acted
otherwise, it would impair their efficacy as expounders
of the Christian faith to the unconverted. I have failed to
find that this advice of St. Augustine had any direct in­
fluence on later theologians or ecclesiastics. In any case, it
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THE COSMIC OBDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

7

tian faith which departed most widely from the Augustinian
tradition who were most receptive to innovations in science
and went furthest in accommodating their theology to the
findings of scientists.
The early Christians were largely recruited from among
the poorer classes. There was little occasion for them to be
grateful to a kind providence which showered them with
temporal blessings. In any case, it was not worldly ease and
prosperity which they were taught to expect from Chris­
tianity, but hope for happiness in a future life. The doc­
trines of the Fall of Man and of the Flood, and of their
adverse consequences for the material state of mankind
on this earth and even for the physical state of the earth
itself, called for a pessimistic and not an optimistic view
of the relations of the physical cosmos to man's temporal
welfare. What has been called the "Christian optimism"
of early Christianity was in any normal sense of the term
"optimism" only such with respect to the prospects for an
idyllic afterlife, and even these prospects were often held
to be dim for many, perhaps for most, of the believers. The
new optimism of the seventeenth century and later, which
was to have an important impact on social thought, was in
part a turning away from the Augustinian tradition in
Christianity and from the doctrine of original sin. It was in
part even a turning away, in the guise of "deism," from
revealed religion.
In the Old Testament there are occasional references
to the benefits man derives from the firmament, the
"heavens"; they provide mankind with rain, with the suc­
cession of the seasons, with the alteration of cold and
warmth, and with favorable winds. St. Paul (Romans,
1.20) cited the understanding that man gets of the nature
of God from what is visible of the universe that he created,
and St. Augustine later relied heavily on this text to justify
inferences as to the nature of God from what we know of
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ROLE OF PROVTOENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

the universe he created. The appeal to the order that reigns
throughout the universe as evidence of design and there­
fore of the existence of the gods had been made in Greece,
at least as early as the seventh century H.C. as an argument
against the doctrine that the universe was the product of
chance.
The use of the argument from design for demonstrating
the existence of God does not appear to have become wide­
spread until the seventeenth century. It, of course, consti­
tuted the Via Quinta of the famous effort of St. Thomas
Aquinas to prove the existence of God philosophically; that
is, without appeal to revelation. Until, however, there
existed widespread skepticism or doubt about the authority
of the Scriptures, there was not much occasion for seeking
support for belief in God's existence from philosophy or
science or human reason.
The first of the great threats to the credibility of the
Biblical account of the origin and mode of operation of
the physical universe emanating from scientific discovery
was, of course, the Copernican revolution in astronomy in
the sixteenth century. The establishment of the theory that
the earth rotated daily on its axis and that the planets, in­
cluding the earth, revolved in orbits around the sun, seemed
to some to constitute a major rejection of the geocentric in­
terpretation of the universe which the Scriptures ex­
pounded; the heliocentric doctrine threatened the authority
of a theology based on a historical account of miraculous
events occurring in a small corner of a small planet in an
infinite universe. Development of the argument from de­
sign as a support of belief in the existence of an all-powerful
supernatural being became for the first time since the estab­
lishment of the Christian faith an urgent necessity for those
believers who were acquainted with the progress of sci­
entific thought.
The Copernican shock to traditional theology was of
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

9

course only the first of a continuing series. Geological dis­
coveries which tended to cast doubt on the credibility of the
world, and still more of the universe, being created in six
days and on the age of the world being limited to something
under 6,000 years; the beginnings of scrutiny of the inner
harmony and the historical authenticity of the Biblical
texts in the form in which they had been handed down;
much later, the appearance of evolutionary theories and the
gradual accumulation of scientific evidence which seemed
to support them, all of these were additional landmarks
of the growth of speculation and evidence threatening the
authority of Scriptures with respect to the physical nature
of the universe, and even casting a measure of doubt on its
over-all authority. Except for express evolutionary doctrine,
whose day was still to come, it was the formidable task of
the orthodox theology of the seventeenth century to meet
these various challenges to its validity.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries met these chal­
lenges to traditional beliefs in a variety of ways. The
easiest way was to ignore them, or perhaps more precisely,
to remain ignorant of them; this was in fact the path taken
by many, automatically by the unlearned, more deliberately
by others. It would be interesting to know, for instance,
how extensive and how protracted was the failure on the
part of men of some intellectual status to show in their
references to astronomical matters any awareness of what
Copernicus, or later Galileo, had said on these matters. I am
sure that the experts could readily find instances of such
lags exceeding a century. Another way was for ecclesiastics,
in the interest of protecting their flocks from disturbance
of their traditional beliefs, to coerce or frighten scientists
into deferment of publication of their findings, or to extort
public retraction of their findings, or even to burn a scientist
or two at the stake "pour encourager Ies autres."
I have encountered the opinion expressed by a historian
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

of science that persecution of the scientists did not in fact
retard significantly the progress of "science," that is, of sci­
entific propositions which present-day scientists accept as
established. That may be so. To make it plausible to me,
however, I would have to be persuaded either that "true"
science began only yesterday, or that many scientists had
a subconscious craving for martyrdom so that the risk of
persecution operated as a stimulus instead of a deterrent
to dangerous inquiry, or that we possess some scientific
technique for discovering the quantity and quality of the
scientific inquiries whose results were never disclosed or of
inquiries which were abandoned before completion be­
cause of fear of persecution. On the law of chances, I
should think that the constraints on scientific investigation
and publication must have operated to retard the dissemina­
tion both of some measure of scientific nonsense and error
and some measure of valuable knowledge.
Another way of meeting the new challenges to traditional
beliefs arising from new scientific discoveries was to fight
the innovators with their own weapons; that is, to expose
their scientific error, and to find new scientific supports for
old doctrines. This was an important activity in seven­
teenth- and eighteenth-century England for men of preten­
sions to scientific expertise. Much nonsense written in the
language of science resulted therefrom. But it seems also
that some genuine contributions to knowledge also resulted,
per accidentem, from these investigations. In any case,
there seems to be no law of nature which guarantees that
the outcome of investigation or experiment carried on with
pious bias will not be new and valuable knowledge.
The most important way, however, in which theologians
adjusted themselves to scientific innovations was to adapt,
or to use the technical term, to "accommodate," their theol­
ogy to the new information. The most orthodox way of
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

11

doing so was to apply the traditionally highly elastic and
traditionally respectable art of exegesis to the Biblical texts
so as to blunt or eliminate any contradiction by these texts,
when taken literally, of new information whose claims to
validity it was difficult or even for good theological reasons
undesirable to impugn. In England in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, moreover, there was being expounded
a doctrine of so-called "progressive revelation," a term
which was used in several different senses. In one sense, it
merely liberalized the scope of orthodox exegesis; it treated
revelation as immutable, but held that there could be pro­
gressive understanding of it. In another sense, the most
common one, progressive revelation signified the historical
progress from the Old Testament to the New, with a later
text canceling in effect an earlier one with which it was in
actual or seeming conflict. This was a new formulation of
what had been orthodox doctrine from the Christian
Fathers. A third meaning of the term, however, involved a
more-or-less general license to reject particular Biblical
texts instead of merely reinterpreting them, for it postulated
the possibility and even probability that new revelation had
occurred since the age of the Apostles, that there may
indeed have been a continuing revelation, which went be­
yond the textual contents of the Bible, however interpreted.
For Roman Catholicism, the Church was the exclusive
authoritative custodian of the truth, which had when
needed infallible access to new light and exclusive authority
to validate it, and had never committed itself to the text of
the Scriptures and to reason as its sole resource. For it,
therefore, the doctrine of progressive revelation in any of its
meanings would not have been revolutionary or dangerous
doctrine. In the nineteenth century, in fact, something very
close to it was formally expounded within the Church, first
by Jean-Adam Moehler in Germany, and later by Cardinal
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

Newman in England, under the label of "development,"
and seems to have received wide acceptance in Catholic
circles.
In Protestantism the situation was different. It had no
central church authority as the custodian of doctrine. It
made no claims to continuing ecclesiastical access to direct
inspiration. It put great emphasis on the rights of indi­
vidual judgment as to what was true doctrine. Enthusiasti­
cally followed, the doctrine of progressive revelation in the
third sense I have distinguished—license to reject particular
Biblical text instead of merely reinterpreting them—would
have opened the way to undisciplined acceptance of inno­
vations in theology. Incidentally, it could in effect have
operated to remove all barriers to accommodation of doc­
trine to new discoveries in science, or to new insights in
ethics. It obtained some measure of explicit acceptance in
both Anglicanism and Dissent. It is implied in much of
English eighteenth-century theological writing. But it
never seems to have become "orthodox" in any Protestant
religious body with old institutional antecedents.
What was probably the most important factor in facilitat­
ing accommodation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England between theology and science was a marked shift
of emphasis in the theology of both Anglicanism and Dis­
sent from Biblical texts to "natural theology" or to deism,
with reason and sentiment in both cases offered as the bases
for belief. This shift had many roots: the influence of the
Enlightenment in general; disillusionment on humanitarian
grounds with much of the Augustinian tradition; the de­
velopment of a secular ethics resting on human experience
instead of traditional dogma, and so forth.
"Natural theology" was not an innovation. It had been
freely accepted in Catholicism from at least the late Middle
Ages as a supplement to and reinforcement of revealed
doctrine. It found early acceptance in Anglicanism. From
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

13

1660 on it was the major substance of sermons and treatises
in English non-Calvinist Dissent. Although in English
theology also, natural theology was in principle only a sup­
plement to and not a corrective of revealed doctrine, in
much of eighteenth-century English theological writing the
"natural" theology is much more prominent than the "re­
vealed" theology. "Deism" is difficult to define. The word
was more often used as an epithet by those hostile to it than
as an acceptable label by those friendly to it. Two species of
deists can be distinguished: first, those who in their writings
systematically abstracted from revelation, or made only
token appeals to it, but never explicitly rejected it as un­
authentic or of little weight; second, those, sometimes
called "critical deists," who more or less openly rejected
revealed doctrine, and were suspected, sometimes rightly,
as not regarding themselves as Christians. As between
moral theologians, non-critical deists, and critical deists, it
is rarely easy to be sure of proper classification of any par­
ticular individual. Deists were, in fact, often suspected not
only of being non-Christians but of being atheists. But if
there were any authentic atheists of any consequence in
seventeenth- or eighteenth-century England, or Scotland,
they were so secretly, and their secret has been kept.
I shall for the time being disregard the Calvinists, as well
as Augustinians who did not accept the Calvinist label, for
they represent a special case with respect both to their
providential doctrines and their attitudes towards science,
and therefore can be most conveniently treated separately.
As for the others, what basis existed for tension between
their religious beliefs and the findings of scientists? As I see
it, there were only two that were of major importance, not
only for thinking about the physical order of the universe
but also for thinking about its moral and social order.
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

tion involved propositions about the physical nature of the
universe or of any part of it, would be profoundly disturbed
by reports of observations by scientists which were in obvi­
ous contradiction of such propositions. In practice, as far
as intellectuals were concerned, this affected chiefly a mi­
nority, and apparently a steadily shrinking one, of conserva­
tive Anglicans; other Anglicans could "accommodate"
without embarrassment to most new scientific knowledge
by resort to established methods of exegesis of Biblical
texts. All believers, even if critical deists are included un­
der this designation, would object to propositions express­
ing or implying the non-existence of a ruling providence
which was in some significant sense sovereign over the uni­
verse. To many believers, including deists, any account of
the universe, or of any portion of it, which pictured it both
as not having had a definite time of origin and as being selfoperating would seem a denial of any role to providence,
and therefore as being offensive on religious grounds.
If this is accepted, and if we continue to defer considera­
tion of Calvinist thought, it is misleading to speak of ten­
sions between religious beliefs and scientific beliefs as to the
physical nature of the universe as if they were clear-cut
tensions between, on the one hand, the thinking of profes­
sional theologians and, on the other hand, the thinking of
men addicted to speculation about and investigation of
natural phenomena. In the first place, these were often the
same men, so that whatever tension was present was in­
ternal. In the second place, the Genesis account of the crea­
tion of the world and of its subsequent mode of operation
was defended, and was rejected, by both professional
theologians and professional scientists. The burden of de­
fense, in fact, was too difficult technically to be prudently
undertaken by theologians who were merely theologians.
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

15

men, who assumed that burden. In the third place, there
was dispute about the manner in which scientific findings
should be presented, in which professional theologians and
scientists were participants together on both sides of the
controversy. Such dispute did not necessarily involve dif­
ference either in religious beliefs or in the religious implica­
tions of the findings of scientists. It could be primarily a
dispute about professional manners.
Many scientists protested that their investigations would
be hampered if in their scientific work and in the form in
which they presented their findings they would be under
obligations at every step to trace the sequence of causes
from the secondary or immediate causes they were dealing
with all the way back to the ultimate or final cause. Many
other scientists, on the other hand, after saying what they
found to say about the mode of operation of secondary
causes indulged freely in dicta or in speculation about the
links between the secondary causes and the final cause, or
causes. Many pious persons, including scientists, were
fearful lest concentration on secondary causes without
reference to final causes would give the impression that
God was an absent God, who perhaps had once created the
universe but, if so, thereafter left it to its own devices as a
self-operating machine. Some of them, moreover, saw in
the concentration of many scientists on the "order" and
regularity of natural phenomena, on the search for "laws
of nature," the regrettable result that the general public
would interpret their findings in such a manner as to im­
pugn the sovereignty of God, and to leave no room for
intermittent or continuous interventions of providence, in­
cluding both interventions to support the regularity of
operation of the laws of nature and interventions by way of
miracles to bring about their temporary and partial suspen­
sion. But once more, these were concerns of some scientists
as well as of some theologians.
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

Some of the turns which discussion of the relations of
theology with science took can be conveniently illustrated
by the history of the metaphor of God as a watchmaker, or
earlier, as a clockmaker. Its first use has been attributed
to a number of writers: among them, Paley, Bolingbroke,
Boyle, Sir Walter Raleigh, in England; Fontenelle, Des­
cartes, on the Continent. It goes much further back, how­
ever. I can vouch for two fourteenth-century uses of it. It
has been attributed to Epictetus. It is to be found in Cicero,
not an anachronism, I hasten to say, if any time-measuring
device is covered by the term "clock." Its main function
has been to illustrate the doctrine that the world, or the uni­
verse, by the regularity and order of its operations, demon­
strates that it is, like a clock, the product of an intelligent
designer, with the clockmaker representing God. It can
thus be used as support for an argument for the existence
or the skill of God. It can also be used to illustrate the man­
ner of operation of providence with respect to the world,
but here it can give rise to serious questions.
Isaac Newton gave a picture of a natural order working
with great regularity and efficiency. It had one flaw, how­
ever; it needed an occasional special intervention of God to
keep it in order. For his friend, Richard Bentley, as for
others, this concession that the world once created was
not completely self-operating thereafter, but remained de­
pendent upon God, was a necessary and convincing barrier
to mechanistic explanations of the universe which left no
further role for God once he had created it.
To Leibnitz the Newtonian concession of the necessity
for intermittent or periodic intervention by God to support
the maintenance of order and regularity in the cosmos was
an affront to the workmanship of God in his original design
of it. God, he conceded, did make particular interventions,
that is perform miracles. This he did, however, not to meet
the needs of the physical order but from considerations of
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THE COSMIC OBDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

17

grace. In a letter commenting on the system of Newton and
his followers, Leibnitz remarked: "According to this doc­
trine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time
to time. Otherwise it would cease to go. God had not, it
seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion."
Most of the English Newtonians of the eighteenth cen­
tury quietly omitted from their systems any express pro­
vision, such as Newton had made, for occasional provi­
dential interventions to keep the cosmos in order. Like
Leibnitz they preferred a perpetual motion account of the
order of nature. But unanimity on this issue has never
prevailed, unless our modern scientists have reached it
among themselves. Until at least the end of the eighteenth
century, in any case, men were not agreed as to whether
providence was an abstaining or an intervening one,
whether nature did or did not need help from outside itself
in order to maintain its order and regularity, and even
whether, with or without the aid of providence, nature was
in fact completely orderly and regular. It is interesting that
of two contributors to the Jesuit Journal de Trevoux, one
in 1703 and the other in 1728, both of them using the clock
metaphor, one of them professed a preference for the
Leibnitzian system of a non-intervening providence, while
the other argued that even more irregularity in the opera­
tion of the universe than Newton conceded would be
required if God were to have adequate scope for free
exercise of his sovereignty and expression of his tempera­
ment.
Religious thought seems always to have had a natural
tendency to find a special place for man in the universe as
designed and ruled by providence, that is, to be anthropo­
morphic. Less universally, but often, it has throughout the
ages attributed to man a favored place in the thought of
God, not only in the provision of a blissful heaven for the
afterlife of such men as receive God's saving grace, but also
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

in the blessings flowing to man from providence in his life
on this earth. This I shall label the "optimistic" strain in
religious thought. There was also a pessimistic strain, to
which I have already had occasion to refer, and to which
I shall return later in this lecture. At this point I shall deal
with the optimistic strain, as evidenced by the citation of
special benefits flowing to man from a physical universe
providentially designed, although not necessarily exclu­
sively designed, to serve mankind in his life on this earth.
It seems somewhat paradoxical that the optimistic strain
in the Christian tradition grew in strength and reached its
greatest dimensions after rather than before the heliocentric
system replaced in the minds of at least intellectually
sophisticated men the geocentric system which had uni­
versally been accepted from ancient times, and which is
dominant in the Scriptures. "The heliocentric system," Cassirer has written, "deprived man of his privileged condi­
tion. He became, as it were, an exile in the infinite uni­
verse." "Man," another author has recently written, "has
now lost the illusion that the earth [i.e., man's temporal
home] occupies a central and privileged place in the cos­
mos." This may be true of sophisticated and secularized
scientists. I see few traces of evidence that it represents
accurately the feelings and beliefs of the mass of mankind
in the post-Copernican ages of belief, or even that it would
be confirmed today by an objectively designed question­
naire answered by that substantial proportion of mankind
in the western world which still maintains affiliations with
religious institutions. These two writers, and the many
others who have made similar generalizations, underesti­
mate, I believe, the tough shell with which nature, or per­
haps providence, has endowed the mind of man so that
it resists stubbornly the undermining of its inherited beliefs
by the progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge
which rebuts ancient notions of the physical nature of the
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

19

cosmos. Hobbes was once rebuked for thinking that he
could make and break monarchies by geometry. If we are
prudent, we should perhaps guard against overestimating
the power of astronomical knowledge over men's minds
and behavior.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in any case,
it was for many men psychologically impossible to believe
that God did not constantly have man in his providential
care, and that the physical order of the cosmos was not one
of the tools he had designed to serve that purpose. The
period in fact abounded, as never before, and perhaps
never since, in attempts to demonstrate the manner in
which the cosmos served man, much of it written by men
with as good claims to be regarded as scientists as any men
of their time. Many of these writings today engender
chiefly smiles on the part even of laymen ignorant with
regard to science, and I suppose that, if today's accredited
scientists were to read them, which I am sure they rarely
do, they would in the main respond with boisterous
laughter. But I am engaged in a venture in objective history,
not in an exercise in value judgments, and I know that this
literature, while it did arouse some covert ridicule from a
few contemporaries, was on the whole warmly received,
often ran into many editions, was translated into the leading
languages of the western world, and was still being re­
printed in the nineteenth century.
The demonstration of the benefits to mankind flowing
from the physical structure and mode of operation of the
universe external to our sphere was perhaps the most diffi­
cult of the tasks undertaken by those who expounded in
anthropocentric terms the skill of God's workmanship.
Some points could be made easily. It was from the heavens
that the nourishing rains came, the rotation of day and
night, warmth and coolness when needed by pastures and
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

sure to the observant human beings. Even the occasional
disturbances of the normal regularity of the outer spheres
were often considered particular providences to serve man­
kind's needs. Philo of Alexandria had already in the first
century A.D. shown one way to interpret irregular occur­
rences, whether on earth or above. Storms, earthquakes,
pestilences, served as needed purges of the wickedness of
men, and incidentally benefited in various ways those who
were not their victims. Some of the early Christian Fathers
provided the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers
on the beneficence of providence with much usable ma­
terial. Increase Mather in New England expounded the
serviceability to mankind of the signs in the heavens. These
gave man awareness of the passage of time and upon occa­
sion acted as special warnings that important events were
imminent. He interpreted the eclipse in Boston in August,
1672, as evidence that nature shared with Harvard the
grief at the death of President Chauncey. Bishop William
King, a pioneer contributor to the systematic literature of
theodicy, or the optimistic justification to man of the ways
of providence, had argued, late in the seventeenth century,
that without "peculiar providences" there would be no use
in prayer. Edmund Law, his editor, pointed out that this
could be used against the preestablished-harmony doctrine
of Leibnitz, which denied the need for particular provi­
dences to support the normal course of nature. By this time
Leibnitz was no longer there to reply, but his answer could
have been that he could adhere to his doctrine without con­
ceding the uselessness of prayer by regarding prayer as a
method for inducing God to exercise special graces outside
of and with no influence on the regular order of nature.
One should not expect to find much in the literature of
the period on what service to mankind could be rendered
by such spheres as were so distant from this earth that even
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

21

ceived. In any case, after some search, my failure to find
such material has been practically complete. One imagina­
tive writer, Robert Jenkin, writing in 1700, did speculate
that if it were to be found that some planets were habitable
but not actually inhabited, this should not be taken as evi­
dence that in the design of providence they were not in­
tended to serve mankind.
For they might be designed, if mankind had continued in innocency, as places for colonies to remove men to as the world should
be increased, either in reward to those that had excelled in virtue
and piety, to entertain them with the prospect of new and better
worlds, and so by degrees, to advance them in proportion to their
deserts, to the height of bliss and glory in heaven; or as a necessary
reception for men (who would then [that is, before the Fall of
Man] have been immortal) after the earth had been full of
inhabitants. . . . And in the meantime, being placed at their
respective distances, they do by their several motions contribute
to keep the world at a poise, and the several parts of it at an
equilibrium in their gravitation upon each other, by Sir Isaac
Newtons principles.

Isaac Watts, the hymn writer, incidentally seeking a pur­
pose that could be served by all the misery in the world
resulting from original sin, suggested that such misery
might be acting as a useful lesson to populations of other
planets. This is the only instance I know of a writer dis­
cussing possible flows of benefits from this earth outwards.
The exponents of an optimistic providentialism pos­
sessed, or could acquire, a much greater stock of factual
data, of hypotheses, and of plausible conjectures in their
search for evidence of design favorable to man, when they
studied man's immediate physical environment than when
they studied the stars. They did exploit the resources of
knowledge then available to them in the disciplines of geol­
ogy, botany, zoology, anatomy, physical geography, and
so on, and they worked systematically to acquire new
knowledge, for both its own sake and to serve their pious
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

purposes. Some used their findings to defend, usually selec­
tively, the account of the physical universe given in Gene­
sis. All inquirers claimed to have discovered new evidence
of God's skill as a designer of the universe, and of the
eminent fitness of this design to serve the needs of man.
For those who accepted Genesis with some approach to
literal interpretation, looking at man's physical environ­
ment through rose-tinted spectacles would not have been
appropriate. According to Genesis, man because of his sin­
fulness was to live on this earth subject to various penalties
impairing not only his social relations but also his physical
environment. Most of the providential writers, however,
managed either to interpret the effects of the fall of man in
mitigated fashion or largely or wholly to disregard the
doctrine of the fall and all or most of the traditional elabora­
tion of the consequences of original sin. The scientific
writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, with
the exception of those of a small group of authors, mostly
English, who were largely treated by their contemporaries
as morbid pessimists and "enthusiasts," were overwhelm­
ingly optimistic in intent and in the character of their find­
ings. They found evidences of design wherever they looked,
and to a large extent they presented these evidences as
demonstrating that the design was such as to be beneficial
to mankind in its life on earth. If in particular instances
they experienced failure to find such evidence, they rarely
reported it.
The kinds of evidence of design the scientists most ear­
nestly searched for and were most successful in finding
were the fitness of physical environment to the vegetable
and animal life existing there, the fitness of organic struc­
ture to its function, and finally the serviceability of all this
to the needs of mankind. Only rarely did they encounter
skeptical questions, sometimes coming from rival scientists
who had their own collections of evidence of design. Were,
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

23

for instance, particular physical environments designed for
the convenience of particular plant or animal life, or did the
plants and animals wander in search of environments fit
for their needs? One type of objection was common; what
was the virtue of the fitness of a forest to the needs of an
animal dangerous to man, or what the vktue of topographi­
cal or climatic conditions fit for the propagation of insects
pernicious to animals or to man? One pattern of answer ap­
pealed to the chain-of-beings doctrine, which pointed to
the virtues of variety—that is, no missing links in the chain
—and plenitude—that is full quantitative representation
of each link. With the aid of the chain-of-beings doctrine
the existence of pernicious insects could be reconciled with
the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds; after
all, these insects also had claims on providence. Or their
existence could be justified on the ground of their consti­
tuting the food of other animals, or of their beauty. F. C.
Lesser, author of a book on insects with the interesting title
of lnsecto-Theologia, first published in 1738, with many
subsequent editions and translations, in one chapter
heralded even "the devastations made by insects" as "so
many marks of the power, the justice, the wisdom, and even
of the goodness of God." But without any explanation of
his change of approach, his immediately following chapter
was an essay on "The Proper Means of Exterminating In­
sects." Anyone who examines this type of literature, how­
ever, will be forced to acknowledge that its authors when
challenged to reconcile what were on their face apparently
extreme contradictions, would rarely be at a loss for in­
genious solutions adequate to satisfy a vast reading public
determined to accept the doctrine of a wise, omnipotent,
and benevolent providence.
As I shall have occasion in a subsequent lecture to argue,
optimistic providentialism played a major role in the fash­
ioning of the social thought of the eighteenth century. The
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

theological foundations of the doctrine, however, were
mainly such as to lead to a static instead of a dynamic or
an evolutionary theory of the nature of the universe. This
applied also to the "scientific" evidence in support of opti­
mistic providentialism accumulated in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The special association, in the minds
of modern scholars, of eighteenth-century thought with the
idea of progress can be supported only by concentrating
on writers of the period who either failed to construct a
harmonious system or were a minority of outsiders, heretics
of one species or another, who accepted little of the pre­
vailing providential doctrine of the period except the one
proposition that the order and regularity perceivable in the
universe could be explained only as the product of design
by an intelligent being.
I should point out that, while there is no difficulty in dis­
covering instances in the scientific literature of the period
of what now seems extraordinarily naive credulity in find­
ing providential fitnesses of natural phenomena to human
needs, some modern accounts of the extent of such naivete
should be treated with caution. It was the practice of some
anonymous wits of the period, especially in France, to in­
vent fantastic examples of such fitnesses and attribute them
falsely to particular providentialists. I am doubtful, for
instance, that there can be traced back to a genuine text of a
scientific adherent of providentialism any of the following
examples which have been widely used to indicate the ab­
surd lengths to which the doctrine was then carried by men
of stature: that the variety of shades of green in the land­
scape had been designed to rest the eyes of observers; that
the seacoasts had been so arranged as to facilitate the en­
trance of ships into ports; that great rivers had been so
located as to pass by and thus serve the great cities that
were in time to arise; that the melon had been given many
sides so as to facilitate its being eaten en famille. It is safe,
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THE COSMIC ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF MAN

25

I think, to take these examples as the fabrications of ir­
reverent cynics who had no pious scruples as to where to
seek their fun.
Finally, I must now say something to support my belief
that the optimistic providentialism of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was not shared by those in the
Augustinian tradition whether Protestant or Catholic. For
them the doctrines of the Fall of Man, the curse of Adam,
the second Fall of Man and the Flood, were insurmountable
barriers to acceptance of optimistic pictures of the destiny
of man while on this earth. I know of no evidence that any
of the strict Augustinians in English or Scottish or Dutch or
Genevese Calvinism, or any of the Jansenists, participated
in the search for evidences of the activity of a benevolent
providence in the physical nature of the earth. Their stress
was on the majesty, the omnipotence, the sovereignty of
God, not on his benevolence to man while he Uved in sin
on this earth.
There is recent literature of some dimensions purporting
to show that there was a special affinity, at least in England,
between Calvinism, or Puritanism, and science in the
second half of the seventeenth century and later. What
skepticism I have found as to the validity of this thesis turns
chiefly on whether scientific achievement was exclusively
Protestant or Calvinist. I would concede that if any edu­
cated Englishman in the seventeenth century was austere
and sober in his mode of life, believed that salvation was to
be sought through activity serviceable to mankind on this
earth rather than by monastic contemplation or perform­
ance of ecclesiastical ceremonies, he was more likely to
engage in the disciplined toils of scientific inquiry than if
he were a Cavalier rake or roisterer. That is about all I am
willing to concede after some investigation of both primary
and secondary sources. Instead, however, of finding a
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

lievers in the full rigor of the Augustinian doctrine of
original sin, the only instances I have found to date in
England, in Scotland, in Holland, in Geneva, or among the
Jansenists, were Pascal in France and in England possibly
Wallis and Graunt, who were by repute "Calvinists," but
about whose theological views I have failed to find sub­
stantial information. It can be shown that many of the
original members of the Royal Society who have been cited
as examples of the special affinity between Calvinism and
science had no institutional or family associations with
orthodox Calvinism and that some of those who did un­
questionably have a Calvinist background or ancestry were
at least by 1660 rebels against Calvinist orthodoxy, and
were in later terminology "moderates" if on the criteria of
orthodoxy they were not even worse. At the least, the
evidence is overwhelming that optimistic providentialism
had its roots in the Enlightenment, and in the "seculariza­
tion" of even religious thought, more than in traditional
Christian orthodoxy when that is understood in the Augustinian sense. In fact, I think I have some evidence for
the thesis that in England, in Scotland, and in Geneva
scientific interest and achievement were associated with
"lapsed Calvinism," and with rebellion against Calvinism,
instead of with adherence to orthodox Calvinist theology.
I have in this lecture said virtually nothing specific about
what is supposed to be the topic of these lectures, the role
of providence in the social order. It seemed to me neces­
sary, however, to sketch the historical background of
providentialist thought in general before I could venture
with any chance of success to make clear the religious and
the intellectual foundations of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury social providentialism.

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II. The Providential Elements in the Commerce of
Nations
IN THIS LECTURE I deal with the history of two providen-

tialist ideas relating to the economic status of man living in
society which have played roles in the evolution of eco­
nomic thought although mostly without having caught the
notice of historians of that evolution. These ideas have
ancient origins.
The earliest in time of these two ideas expounds a provi­
dential relative abundance of necessaries as compared with
luxuries. Plato, early in the fourth century, B.C., stated
that only what is rare commands a high price and that
water, which is the best of all things, is also the cheapest.
He offered no explanation, however, and did not expressly
attribute the fact, if such it is, to providential design. Epi­
curus, several decades later, was in effect to repeat this
proposition, and add to it an express attribution of the phe­
nomenon to providence. "Gratitude," he wrote, "is due to
blessed nature because she has made life's necessities easy
of acquisition and those things difficult of acquisition
unnecessary."
Pufendorf, in about the 1670's, discovered the idea in a
book by Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the first century
B.C., and embraced it with some enthusiasm. It is probable
that it was through Pufendorf that eighteenth-century
writers became acquainted with the idea. In his De Archi­
tecture, Vitruvius, as reported by Pufendorf, after citing
water as an example of things essential to the maintenance
of human life which exist in abundance, proceeded as
follows:
The divine mind has not made those things which are specially
necessary to mankind as inaccessible and expensive as are pearls,
gold, silver, and the like, which neither our body nor our nature
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

requires, but has poured forth ready to hand throughout all the
world what is necessary for the safety of our mortal life.

I have not found the idea expressed or implied in the
Old Testament. It thus seems to have had a pagan origin.
The first statement of it in the Christian era that I have
found is by Clement of Alexandria (150P-220 A.D. ) in his
Paidagogos (The Teacher): "God supplies us, first of all,
with the necessities such as water and the open air, but
other things that are not necessary [such as gold and pearls]
He has hidden in the earth and sea." I have found a fair
number of statements of this idea thereafter, continuing
into at least the middle of the eighteenth century. Among
the writers who expounded it, in addition to Pufendorf,
were Moise Amyraut, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Christian
von Wolff. The last in time of the statements of it that I
have encountered were by Francis Hutcheson, Adam
Smith's teacher at Glasgow, who was steeped in Pufendorfs
writings. One of Hutcheson's statements of the idea runs as
follows: "By the wisdom and goodness of Providence really
important things are more abundant and cheaper than
those which a'wise man would regard of little use."
No writer developed the idea with any degree of elabora­
tion. Amyraut, a Huguenot of Arminian, that is, in my
terminology, of optimistic, tendencies, recognized that even
so-called "necessaries" might have substitutes, and carried
the idea of providential abundance a step further by claim­
ing that where what was ordinarily an essential commodity
or natural circumstance was lacking, providence would
have seen to it that a favorable offsetting circumstance
would exist nearby to make up for the deficiency. Where
the weather is cold, forests to supply wood for fuel are
likely to abound. Where wood is lacking, there will be
available either burnable earth (he had turf in mind, I
presume) or burnable stones (coal, I presume, is meant).
Where the supply of water for beasts of burden is scarce,
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PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE

29

there will be suitable animals available (camels, I suppose)
which can go without water for several days. Where the
soil is not suitable for growing wheat it provides roots
which men can use for food.
Charles Rollin, an eighteenth-century professor of litera­
ture at the College de France, whose writings my learned
colleague at Princeton, Professor Samuel Howell, tells me
were well known in England and influenced the teaching
of criticism in the English and Scottish universities, in­
cluded, in the eighteenth-century pattern, some optimistic
theologizing in his teaching of his special discipline. As
one instance, he pointed out that sea fish of species useless
to man stay in waters remote from places of human habita­
tion, while the most edible kinds of sea fish are guided by
the hand of providence even to enter the mouths of rivers
and to run up them to their sources so as to bring the ad­
vantages of the sea to such peoples as live at a distance
from it.
In my first lecture, I ventured the generalization that it
was mainly the followers of what I have labeled as the opti­
mistic strain in theology who sought evidence in nature
of the benevolence of providence with respect to man's life
on this earth, and that those who emphasized the adverse
effects of the Fall on the temporal life of man either paid no
attention to such doctrine or rejected it as heretical. I find
confirmation of this generalization in the history of the idea
of the providential abundance of necessaries as compared
to the scarcity of luxuries. Except for an isolated "Pensee"
of Pascal of doubtful relevance, I have found the idea only
in the writings of men who clearly belong in the optimistic
strain of theological thinking with respect to man's status
in his earthy life.
A seventeenth-century English scientist, John Woodward,
who still finds occasional mention in histories of science
for both his genuine scientific discoveries and his fantastic
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

scientific errors, strove to find in geological and botani­
cal facts evidences of the historical validity of the account
in Genesis of the adverse physical consequences for man
of his fall. He used as his text the verses in Genesis 3:
17-19: "cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shall thou
eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles
shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of
the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till
thou return unto the ground." Woodward, taking what he
could see of the relative state of prosperity of thistles and
wheat in his own time as data for the purpose of verification
of Genesis, found not only that thistles were thriving, but
that they were in their character apparently "more mis­
chievous, troublesome, and molesting" to man than they
once had been, although he conceded that he had not as
yet found geological evidence as to what their character
had been before the Fall of Man. As for wheat, he at­
tributed to post-Fall developments the severity of the con­
temporary obstacles to its successful cultivation in the
shape of impoverished soil, poor seed, and adverse climatic
conditions. These changes favorable to thistles and un­
favorable to wheat he attributed to God's decision to make
the earth better suited for the moral disciplining which
man needed in his lapsed state. This belief in the abundance
of nuisance conditions and the scarcity of conditions favor­
able to the temporal life of man was of course an exact op­
posite to the idea of a contrast between the providential
abundance of things important for man's temporal life and
the scarcity of unimportant things. It is a reasonable sur­
mise that had later expounders of the idea of the provi­
dential abundance of necessaries known of John Wood­
ward's contradictory thesis and thought it was being widely
accepted, they would have sought for evidence that thistles
were in fact scarce, or were at least only a minor pest, or
were in some subtle way really a blessing.
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Economists interested in the history of their own disci­
pline should not brush aside the idea of the providential
abundance of necessaries as merely pious folklore involving
a type of mishandling of economic phenomena from which
training in economics would have provided effective pro­
tection. It is true that the idea probably involves a perverse
transposing of causes and effects such as is common in
providentialist thought, as, for instance by explaining the
scarcity of particular commodities by their "luxury" status,
instead of vice versa. But John Locke and Francis Hutcheson, and, except for the absence in this particular instance
of express recognition of a providential role, Adam Smith
himself, a trio of no mean standing in the history of eco­
nomics, were among the expounders of the idea of the
abundance of necessaries. It is true also that almost by
definition commodities properly regarded as "necessaries"
had to be abundant and cheap if men were also to be abun­
dant and destined to survive. But economists found it a
tough problem to resolve the so-called "diamond-water
paradox," that is, the apparently inverse correlation be­
tween market values of particular commodities and their
use-values, or religious values, or ethical or aesthetic values,
or functional or technological values. There are still econo­
mists who believe that such resolution awaited the new
light brought by the marginal utility analysis of the Austrian
School in the 1870's. There may even today be economists
who do not have full assurance that it has yet been satis­
factorily resolved. But the "diamond-water paradox" is but
another term for the impression of strangeness and of indi­
cation of a questionable state of human morality which
St. Augustine, and a long line of succeeding theologians
probably extending to the present day, drew from the low
value in the market of living creatures like mice, or horses,
as compared to pearls, or of water as compared to diamonds.
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

trine in moral philosophy, stemming from Aristotle, of the
"scale of values." This doctrine ranks the values of things
according to their kinds without reference to quantities. Its
expounders, I think, would have been helpless in dealing
with the diamond-water paradox if some unkind person had
brought it to their attention.
The field of general value theory offers perhaps the best
available illustration of the general proposition that when
two disciplines are at all interrelated in subject matter and
share somewhat promiscuously a common vocabulary with­
out having uniform meanings for its terms, each discipline
will inevitably lose something in intelligibility to members
of the other discipline and is liable also to lose some of its
own coherence. The most obvious danger is that members
of the different disciplines will be persuaded that they are
saying the same things because their statements have simi­
lar sounds whereas these statements may have nothing in
common except vocabulary and may even be in sharp if
invisible conflict with each other. As long, however, as
each such discipline fails to adopt or is prevented from
adopting a unique jargon for itself, there will not be any
remedy for this difficulty except extra care on the part of
the scholar to attain precision of definition and to avoid
ambiguity.
The second idea whose history I will trace in this lecture
is somewhat complicated and can perhaps be most clearly
formulated by presenting it as consisting of the combina­
tion of two sub-ideas:(1) providence favors trade between
peoples as a means of promoting the universal brotherhood
of man; (2) to give economic incentives to peoples to trade
with each other providence has given to their respective
territories different products. The first full statement of
these propositions in combination was, as far as is known,
made in the fourth century A.D. It emerged, however, from
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a complex set of historical and intellectual antecedents,
which I will try to sketch before giving an account of the
later fortunes of the doctrine.
In ancient times in the eastern Mediterranean region
transport by water was much more feasible and much less
expensive than overland transport because of the difficul­
ties of the terrain and the absence of good roads, as well as
because of the normal advantages of water transport over
land transport at all times and in all places where the two
are practically available alternatives. In that region, water
transport meant as a rule sea transport, since navigable
rivers were few and usually not located conveniently to
densely populated regions. Interregional commerce and
overseas commerce were therefore substantially synony­
mous. There was prevalent throughout the area an am­
bivalent set of attitudes towards the sea and another
ambivalent set of attitudes towards commerce, reflecting
religious, ethical, aesthetic, and political considerations, as
well as more strictly economic ones. In principle, attitudes
towards commerce and attitudes towards the sea could be
at opposite poles; in practice the association between the
sea and commerce was so close that it was difficult to be
simultaneously enthusiastic for commerce and a hater of the
sea, or a lover of the sea and a despiser of commerce. This
held true in pre-Christian times for both Greek and Roman
intellectuals, and I think I could show that it was also
true for the writers of the Old Testament.
The attitudes towards the sea and towards commerce
were determined only in part by strictly economic con­
siderations, but these were treated as important. Economic
arguments in favor of the sea, aside from its providing a
source of fish, were largely confined to its serviceability as
a channel for transportation of goods for commercial pur­
poses. Economic arguments for commerce were that it
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

provided a means of mutual exchange of goods in surplus,
or mutual provision of goods in short supply, and that it
gave remunerative employment to sailors and merchants.
The objections to commerce on economic grounds some­
times rested on an outright denial that interregional com­
merce and even local commerce conferred any net eco­
nomic benefits as compared to the self-sufficiency of regions
or even of private estates. More usually, however, the
objectors on economic grounds to commerce specified par­
ticular drawbacks. Commerce, it was claimed, generated
temptations to cheating and to exploitation where the in­
nocent and the unsophisticated would be the victims.
Overseas commerce led to dependence for essential goods
on distant sources of supply, which could be costly in times
of war or other emergency. Foreign commerce tended to
foster tastes for exotic commodities and for luxuries, and
the import of luxuries tended to impoverish a country.
Overseas commerce involved great hazards to sailors, to
ships, and to cargoes, from shipwreck and other casualties
of the sea.
The objections raised against commerce on non-eco­
nomic grounds were many. It was held to be degrading for
the persons directly participating in it, to foster avarice,
to bring undesirable contact with foreign persons, customs,
manners, and ideas, and thus to corrupt the native culture,
to give rise to strategic risks, and to breed wars. Objections
were also made to commerce on religious grounds. Contact
with other countries led to the intrusion into the country of
the cults of foreign gods. Commerce by ships was in itself
an impious activity, since braving the winds and the seas
and the construction of large vessels was an affront to
providence, which intended the seas to be barriers to the
contact of peoples instead of a means of bringing them
into communication with each other.
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ments on providence, were projects to build canals in order
to promote commerce. Herodotus relates that when the
Cnidians were digging a trench across an isthmus near
Rhodes to make an island of their peninsula many of the
diggers suffered injuries, and the project made slow prog­
ress. To envoys sent to Delphi to find out what was wrong,
the priestess at Delphi warned that the digging should
stop; if Zeus had wished the Cnidian land to be an island
he would have long ago made it so. Pliny the elder, in
his Natural History, relates that successive attempts of
Demetrius, Caesar, Caligula, and Nero to build a ship canal
across the Peloponnesian peninsula to join the Aegean and
Ionian seas had all ended in failure. To Pliny this was proof
that to build such a canal was an act of sacrilege. The canal
was in fact finally completed—in 1893!
Most modern commentators seem to find that the pre­
ponderant attitude of the pagan Greeks and Romans to­
wards commerce was hostile. It seems, however, that as
far as Rome was concerned there has been undue reliance
on the texts of a few poets who were expressing personal
views often reflecting individual idiosyncracies or situa­
tions and out of rapport with the prevailing opinion of the
time. I have often run across, in writings from the eigh­
teenth century to the present day, generalizations as to the
hostility of the Romans to commerce, where the sole or
principal evidence specifically cited to support the generali­
zation is a verse in one of Horace's odes in which he asserts:
"in vain has God in his providence parted land from land
by the estranging ocean (Oceanus disassociabilis), if never­
theless impious barks bound across the waters that should
not be touched." I have read, however, that Horace's
personality, including his susceptibility to seasickness as
well as his aesthetic allergy to the sea, points, in fact, to his
utter unreliability as a reporter of Roman attitudes in gen­
eral towards the sea and commerce. Poets have often been
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

acute and penetrating critics of their age, but that is not
quite the same as being a reliable reporter of its prevailing
opinions, which alone is relevant here. Similarly another
Roman poet, Propertius, occasionally is used by modern
commentators for documentation to show that, at what
incidentally happened to be the height of Roman commer­
cial enterprise and naval adventure, the Romans generally
abominated the sea and despised commerce. Propertius,
I am told, was an uplander, with an agrarian bias, and, like
Horace, susceptible to seasickness. Basically he disliked the
sea, the seashore, cities, and the bustle of trade. He had a
lady-love, however, who enjoyed sea travel, liked to play on
the beach at the seaside resorts of the time, and loved to
swim. So Propertius blew hot and cold about the sea,
speaking with some warmth of its charms when Cynthia
was being kind and venting hostile reflections about the
sea, apt for quotation by modern commentators, when
Cynthia was being cold to him. There is much to be said
for the effusions of poets. As primary sources for the his­
torian, however, they are, like all other kinds of effusions,
I suppose, to be treated with caution and discrimination.
In any case, there is an abundance of Greek and Latin
source material, some of it written by poets, which ex­
presses admiration of the sea and treats commerce as a
respectable and even honorable activity. It was not, how­
ever, until the fourth century A.D. that the first explicit
formulation I know of the idea of a favorable interest of
providence in international trade was written. The author
was Libanius, a teacher in Antioch; the work in which
it appeared, when translated from its Greek original, was
given the title, Orationes; the formulation was as follows:
God did not bestow all products upon all parts of the earth, but
distributed His gifts over different regions, to the end that men
might cultivate a social relationship because one would have need
of the help of another. And so he called commerce into being, that
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all men might be able to have common enjoyment of the fruits of
earth, no matter where produced.

Libanius was a pagan, but among his students were two
young men who were destined to be Church Fathers, St.
Basil and St. John Chrysostom. Both directly and through
these Fathers of the Church the idea was to enter what for
the purposes of these lectures I call the optimistic strain in
Christian theology. The emphasis on the universal brother­
hood of man reveals a late Stoic influence on Libanius's
thought. On the other hand, a modern scholar has inter­
preted Libanius's emphasis throughout his writings on
the providential concern for the temporal welfare of man­
kind as showing his desire to strengthen the old pagan
religion's ability to withstand the rising competition of
Christianity by borrowing from the latter its humanitarian
warmth and its sensitivity to human needs and aspirations.
This seems plausible to me. If it is correct, then Libanius
is to be interpreted both as influenced by Christianity and
as having through his writings and his students contributed
to Christian theology an idea which was later to be ac­
cepted by many Christians as one of that theology's most
admirable elements, namely, the idea that God intended
commerce to operate as a unifying factor for all mankind.
I have found in the writings of four early Christian
theologians statements of the doctrine of the providential
function of commerce, all following closely Libanius's
formulation. Of these four, two are St. Basil and St. John
Chrysostom, who, as I have said, were students of Libanius
at Antioch, a third is Theodoretus, Bishop of Cyrus and a
theologian of the school of Antioch, and the fourth is St.
Ambrose, whose Hexameron (or the Six Days) was a free
adaptation in Latin of St. Basil's work of the same title
written in Greek. It is of course highly probable that
thorough search of the writings of the Fathers of the
church by a qualified scholar would disclose additional
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

formulations of the idea. On the evidence I have found,
however, it seems to me practically certain that at least
one way by which the idea entered into the Christian
tradition was via Libanius both directly and through his
Christian students. The comments on commerce of other
Fathers are, as far as I know, never as favorable as is the
Libanius doctrine. Many of them are in fact distinctly
hostile, partly on the basis of the association of trade of any
kind with fraud and exploitation, partly because of the
association of trade with avarice and luxury, and partly
because of lack of recognition of or indifference to its
potential material benefits to mankind.
I have found in secondary sources citations of a moderate
number of explicit statements of the providential interest
in commerce from theological treatises of the high Middle
Ages, several of them by influential and otherwise impor­
tant writers, for instance, Henri de Langenstein in the
fourteenth century, St. Antoninus of Florence in the fif­
teenth century, Giovanni Botero in the early sixteenth
century. These all correspond more or less closely to
Libanius's formulation, which had already apparently be­
come somewhat of a standard one. It was common at least
by the fourteenth century for international fairs to be
blessed by priests at their opening. In one such fourteenthcentury instance the presiding cleric used a formula which,
translated from the Latin, runs as follows:
God has wished that no country should be able to be completely
self-sufficing by itself, and that each country should have need of
seeking supplies from other countries, in order that they should all
become united by friendly ties.

The modern writer who reports this, adds the comment:
"one can see that the thought which presides over our
present-day international fairs is not of yesterday." He
apparently was not aware that it stemmed, without signifi­
cant change, from Libanius in the fourth century A.D. In
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modern times, when the idea that international trade is
highly beneficial to mankind has been widely and even
enthusiastically accepted, sympathetic students of the eco­
nomic writings of the scholastics have occasionally claimed
to have found the idea that such trade has a providential
blessing quite widespread among them. I am somewhat
skeptical of this, as they all seem to give very much the
same limited set of references to the scholastic literature,
while they tend to neglect the abundance of instances
where scholastics repeat the old objections to foreign trade
on religious and moral grounds.
It would be interesting to know, in this connection, just
where St. Thomas Aquinas stood. One modern authority
on scholastic economics has referred to a passage in
St. Thomas's works which apparently in effect echoes
Libanius's formulation. Elsewhere in his writings, however,
St. Thomas follows faithfully enough the old objections to
foreign trade on the grounds of the economic merits of selfsufficiency, the threat to internal political peace which
results from the presence of many foreigners, the liability to
corruption of morals and manners which much contact with
foreigners entails, and so forth. He introduces, moreover,
what seems to me a novel note in the treatment of this topic;
he invokes the Aristotelian "scale of values" doctrine to
support the merit of economic self-sufficiency:
. . . the higher a thing is the more self-sufficient it is; since what­
ever needs another's help is by that fact proven inferior.
A city which has an abundance of food from its own territory is
more dignified than one which is provisioned by merchants.

St. Thomas does not insist, however, at this point or else­
where, on complete autarchy even as an ideal. There are
few instances, he says, where a city can provide all its
necessaries by its own productive services, and if a city has
surpluses of some commodities, loss to many of the citizens
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

chants to export such surpluses abroad. "Consequently,"
said St. Thomas, "[even] the perfect city will make a
moderate use of merchants."
By the end of the sixteenth century the idea was appear­
ing with some frequency in lay literature both in Protestant
and in Catholic countries. In the seventeenth and eigh­
teenth centuries it had become a commonplace, a familiar
maxim, but increasingly it was being converted from a
merely fashionable or edifying formula to a functional idea,
an argument by which to influence national policy. To the
limited extent to which it continued to remain in circulation
in the nineteenth century, this use provided the main excuse
for stating it. The most recent statement of the idea in
England that I have found, however, was in 1887, in an
almost purely theological treatise.
In the United States, the latest exposition of the idea that
I have encountered was by a Congressman from Missouri
in the House of Representatives in 1894 speaking in sup­
port of the low-tariff Wilson Tariff Bill. The relevant
passage is somewhat long, but I will quote it nevertheless
because to my ear the first half is Libanius translated into
Congressional rhetoric and the second half is Adam Smith
expounded in even purer Americanese:
God could have made this world, if He had wanted to, with
exactly the same climate and soil all over it, so that each nation
would have been entirely independent of any other nation. But
He didn't do that. He made this world so that every nation in it
has got to depend for something upon some other nations. He did
that to promote kinship among the different people. Let us drop
this unnatural business. There is no end to the ingenuity of man.
You can fix up a scheme, if you want, for raising oranges in Maine,
but a barrel of those oranges would make William Waldorf Astor's
pocketbook sick. . . . You can raise polar bears on the Equator
if you spend money enough, but it would take a king's ransom
to do it.
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The illustration used by Adam Smith to make the same
point was raising grapes in Scotland:
By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can
be raised in Scotland . . . but at about thirty times the expence
for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign
countries.

I have not made an extensive search for additional formu­
lations of the idea by American writers, and I know of
only a handful. One of these I will have occasion to quote
later. Another one I will quote at once, as it comes from a
founding member of the Society that is sponsoring these
lectures. In 1729, in his first work dealing with economic
matters, Benjamin Franklin wrote:
As Providence has so ordered it, that not only different countries,
but even different parts of the same country, have their peculiar
most suitable productions, and likewise that different men have
geniuses adapted to variety of different arts and manufactures,
therefore commerce, or the exchange of one commodity or manu­
facture for another, is highly convenient and beneficial to mankind.

As compared with Libanius's formula, this omits mention of
the promotion of fraternity between peoples as the objec­
tive of providence. But from the economist's point of view
it has the merit of adding differences in the skills of differ­
ent peoples as a factor in making commerce beneficial.
I have the impression that there are few ideas of com­
parable age, subtlety, and prevalence with the idea whose
history I have been commenting on, which have so often
been expressed with no indication of awareness of their
past, and which have so often been received by modern
scholars who encounter them in a text as being both im­
portant and novel. The origin of the idea of the interest
of providence in commerce has been attributed by scholars
to Bodin, to Calvin, to an English scholastic of the four­
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

sance writer, L. B. Alberti, to Grotius, and to any number
of others. In April, 1914, a French Catholic priest, in a
contribution to a religious periodical, stated the idea, in the
form of a prayer, with no significant departure from or addi­
tion to Libanius's formula, as part of a plea, a very timely
plea, for friendly relations between countries. This con­
stitutes the very latest statement of the idea not presented
explicitly as a quotation from an earlier writer which I
have encountered anywhere. This statement was quoted
in 1932 at the annual congress of an important French
Catholic organization specializing in social ethics where it
was characterized as "a beautiful prayer" of "profoundly
Catholic inspiration." I suspect that both speaker and
audience at the 1932 meeting were totally unaware that the
idea had been in fairly constant circulation in substantially
the same formulation for at least 1,500 years.
I have already pointed out that in the sixteenth to eigh­
teenth centuries the idea was frequently used in a func­
tional way, that is, to influence national economic policy.
This was the age of mercantilism, and, given my biases, I
find it hard to think of any idea whose acceptance as a
ruling idea by those then in power would under the circum­
stances of the time have had a greater potential for benefit
to mankind. We can be sure that no one who then ex­
pounded it was using it to support objectives equivalent to
what we now call free trade. In France and in England it
was being used domestically to support the liberalization
or moderation of existing restrictions on foreign trade. By
the Protestant jurists like Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel,
it was used against outright prohibitions of trade and
against national monopolies of fisheries and trade routes.
I am unable to judge whether the idea then had any ma­
terial consequences, but it may at least have troubled the
consciences of those who were as rulers and legislators
extending and intensifying restrictions on trade.
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In late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, there
was much internal complaint against the severity of the
mercantilist restrictions on foreign trade which were then
in force. The objectors had in mind not only the effects of
the restrictions on themselves and on the French economy,
but also the almost continuous warfare with which the
restrictions were associated and for which they may have
been in part responsible. Time and again these objectors
used as a religious and moral argument against existing
policy the doctrine of the providential interest in commerce
as generating friendly relations between peoples. They
succeeded at times in putting the government on the de­
fensive and in forcing it to reformulate the case for its
policies and practices in less aggressive and less amoral
terms. This was not a contest, I repeat, between free trade
and mercantilism, for practically everyone with ideas about
national economic policy was then a mercantilist, but be­
tween moderate and extreme mercantilism. At the least, it
forced the government to restate its objectives in terms
which were less obviously in conflict with some widely
accepted religious and ethical views.
In France, however, and to some degree in England
also, ingenious polemicists succeeded somewhat in turning
the flank of those who used the providentialist argument
by giving it a twist which enabled the most extreme mer­
cantilists to adopt it as their own. French extremist mer­
cantilists took to saying that since it was providence which
had chosen France as the sole country which had sufficient
range and extent of resources to do without any imports
of necessaries; severe restraints on importation, no matter
how far they went, could not therefore for her be action
in violation of providential intent.
Belief in complete or nearly complete self-sufficiency
as a practicable and desirable national objective was pecu­
liar to France. In England the doctrine of a providential
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ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

interest in commerce was twisted to serve extreme mercan­
tilist programs by applying it to particular commodities or
trades. Providence had assigned to England the production
of certain commodities or the monopoly of certain particu­
lar trades. It was therefore following the guidance of
providence, not opposing it, to promote these industries or
trades. Also, when providence assigned to England the
production of a particular raw material, like wool, it must
also have assigned to England its processing into woolens.
This reasoning was extended to the acquisition of colonies.
Providence had staked out for English acquisition and
settlement certain overseas areas of the world; the rival
claims of other imperialist countries or of the native inhabi­
tants therefore had no standing.
As an illustration of the application of this type of rea­
soning to the wool-woolens issue I cite from Martin Bucer,
one of the leading Protestant reformers, who in 1549 to 1551
was in England as a professor of theology at Cambridge
University, an adviser of government, and an expounder
of the new Reformed religion. England, he advised, should
process its own wool:
For one should not express doubt that the Lord who had so
abundantly endowed the English with wool had not also wished
that they should employ themselves in the working-up of the wool
into cloth and applying it to the uses of this human life, and not
to transport it abroad to be processed there, while they themselves
lived in idleness.

How do such writers discover in advance, when the
interests of rival nations conflict, which nation providence
will choose to prefer, and how is it that they almost invari­
ably find that it is their own nation? I suppose the answer
is that pious patriotism is a natural product of the psycho­
logical propensity to find affinity between cherished ideas.
John Milton, in the course of an exposition of progressive
revelation, claims that England is usually the first bene­
ficiary Brought
of newtorevelation:
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PROVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMERCE

45

God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his
Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself: what then
does He do but reveal Himself to his servants, and as his manner
is, first to his Englishmen; I say as His manner is, first to us,
though we mark not the method of his counsels, and are unworthy.

Charles Dickens, in his characterization in Our Mutual
Friend, of the London merchant, Mr. Podsnap, pictures him
as complacent both about England, which is to him in no
respect "unworthy," and about the superiority of his own
personal qualities:
"Mr. Podsnap was sensible of its being required of him
to take Providence under his protection. . . . And it was
very remarkable (and must have been very comfortable)
that what Providence meant, was invariably what Mr.
Podsnap meant." Dickens has Mr. Podsnap say that in its
constitution England was favored by providence over all
other countries. When the Frenchman with whom he was
conversing was on the point of asking how it happened that
providence selected England for favors above all other
countries, Podsnap interrupted him to say: "This island
was blest, sir, to the direct exclusion of such other countries
as . . . there may happen to be."
There was little direct criticism of the idea of a providen­
tial interest in commerce by either clerics or laymen. Ex­
ponents of it in general put no heavy reliance on Biblical
texts to support it, in part, no doubt, because they are not
easy to find. The idea was treated by its supporters sub­
stantially as an element in natural rather than in revealed
theology, and searchers of the Scriptures found in them
more hostility to than welcoming of commerce. Luther,
for example, claimed that God did not like commerce and
let his people of Israel live by the sea and yet not engage
in commerce. It was much more godly, said Luther, "to
till the land than to engage in commerce, and those do
better who follow the Scriptures in exploiting the soil and
seeking
their
nourishment
fromMedical
it." Center
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Lutheran
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46

ROLE OF PROVIDENCE IN THE SOCIAL ORDER

theologian, Karl Holl, explains this attitude of Luther as
a reaction to the moral teaching of the scholastics who,
he says, at all points preferred the city dweller to the
peasant.
Lay writers sometimes expounded doctrine inconsistent
with the usual version of the providential interest in com­
merce. Daniel Defoe, early in the eighteenth century,
while insisting that "there is a kind of divinity in the origin
of trade" found this divine origin of trade not, or perhaps
not only, in a providential desire to promote universal
brotherhood, but in the regional dispersion of natural re­
sources designed by providence to force mankind to get its
subsistence by hard work. If all the productions of the
world should have been found in every part, getting com­
modities would have been too easy.
But wise providence having resolved man to eat his bread with
the sweat of his brow, . . . has, to this purpose, placed the
several blessings he has bestowed on the world for the use and
convenience of man, at the remotest distance from one another,
in the most secret, reserv'd and inaccessible parts, and shared to
all parts of the earth something essential to the other, so as to
make a universal correspondence absolutely necessary.

Defoe, however, explains that he is not here rejecting
what I earlier in this lecture called the idea of the providen­
tial abundance of necessaries:
It is true, the common mercies of life, and such as mankind can
least want [i.e., do without] our bountiful creator has made most
universal; such as water for drink, corn and cattle for food.

Voltaire, on the other hand, less disposed than Defoe to
find his guidance in the Scriptures, could see only mystery
in the pattern of world distribution of the earth's fruits:
providence ripens in