Sacred Demonstrations, or the Christian Euclid, Book II

...a state or established power, or he who knows not himself might grasp the measure of God.

5. Established effects are from nature and art; the rest are ascribed to fortune and chance because people wish or think that they would have happened otherwise than they did. In natural things, sometimes monsters are formed when matter is stubborn and does not obey the forms. But God wills that all those things occur no less for the shaking up of human life than the established law. Therefore, antiquity called monsters, omens, and portents the messengers of God.

6. But as God is the first cause of all, so He must be the last of all, just as one who builds a house is the author and the end, or at least the final use must be referred to him. Thus God, the immortal first cause, made the world so that the honor and glory of so great a work might return to Him. But since the end of created things is man, it is necessary that his end be above the world. For the end is more excellent than the things that are for the sake of the end. Whence it is as necessary to understand and believe that man exists for the sake of eternity as it is to assert that the world and the things of art were made by themselves without any cause, if one denies that man was created to be eternal. But before we come to greater things and progress further, after our three principles, we must posit common sentiments to which one ought to assent, just as to the first definitions or descriptions, for they are confessed by all.

1. That every caused thing refers some image of the cause within itself.
2. That things made from an arbitrary cause or one endowed with election occur for the most part in the same way.