About the Planting of Noah (48-49)

Therefore he had learnt, as plainly as any man that ever lived, that God, having fixed the roots and seeds of everything down in the earth, is the cause also of the greatest of all plants, namely this world, shooting up; which world he here seems to speak of enigmatically in the song which I have just quoted, where he calls it the mountain of his inheritance; since that which is made is the most appropriate possession and inheritance, of him who has made it.

Therefore he prays that we may be planted in it, not in order that we may become irrational and unmanageable in our natures; but that, in due obedience to the arrangement of the all-perfect governor, imitating his perpetual and undeviating consistency, we may live a temperate and innocent life. For to be able to live in a strict uniformity with nature, is what the men of old have defined as the end of happiness.