The answer
St. Clement says that God’s goodness is always at work, like the care of a shepherd for his sheep, a king for his subjects, and a father for his children.529 The scholar Origen also says, “And as a husbandman performs different acts of husbandry upon the soil and its productions, according to the varying seasons of the year, so God administers entire ages of time, as if they were, so to speak, so many individual years, performing during each one of them what is requisite with a reasonable regard to the care of the world; and this, as it is truly understood by God alone, so also is it accomplished by Him.”530
Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty
Notes
529 St. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies 6.17 (ANF 2:515–518).
530 Origen, Against Celsus 4.69 (ANF 4:528).