Chapter XVI

Once I remember (I think I was about four years old) when I thus
reasoned with myself. Sitting in a little obscure room in my
father's poor house: If there be a God certainly He must be Infinite
in Goodness, and that I was prompted to, by a real whispering
instinct of nature. And if He be Infinite in Goodness and a perfect
Being in Wisdom and Love, certainly He must do most glorious things
and give us infinite riches; how comes it to pass, therefore, that
I am so poor? Of so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and
obscure comforts? I thought I could not believe Him a God to me
unless all His power were employed to glorify me. I knew not then
my Soul or Body, nor did I think of the Heavens and the Earth, the
Rivers and the Stars, the Sun or the Seas: all those were lost and
absent from me. But when I found them made out of nothing for me,
then I had a God indeed whom I could praise and rejoice in.