SACRED THEMES

God does not punish except mediately, then that He punishes by the contagion of the air, which they assert to be so certain that it can be denied by no one. But it is so certain that not even a trace of it appears in the Word of the Lord, and furthermore, it strikes at the nerve of divine providence, by which we confess that God acts most freely and cannot be bound by any laws, except those by which He spontaneously binds Himself, meanwhile being the most free first cause of all those things He does.

It is truly to be marveled at that [they] are led to the defense of such an error, because God once punished Egypt through intermediate and natural causes, namely through rot and vapors concreted in the air by ἀντιπερίστασιν antiperistasis, the resistance of a contrary power/opposing circumstance, as if indeed lice, flies, and hail could not have arisen immediately, even with no natural causes preceding. For what shall we name, because there the Nile was changed into blood? That animals suddenly arose which devoured the crops: that the night stood for three days: I ask, where were the causes of such a great night in nature? If it is so easy to say the causes were natural, those must be demonstrated, first that such things arise suddenly in the order of nature, then that the sun either stands still in its circuit, or is blocked by such obstacles that it cannot penetrate with its light, and what is the cause that the darkness is palpable in all of Egypt, while in the land of Goshen alone there is light. In vain did God call those miracles by which Pharaoh was to be shattered, and in vain are they sung in the Davidic Psalms as miracles, if they could be accomplished by the laws of nature. For by those miracles, God willed to manifest Himself as the omnipotent creator of heaven and earth,