ABSTRACT
The concept of the order of creation and that order which God is in Himself eternally, and the relation between them, was by no means confined to the awareness and works of the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The idea of God as a God of order, and the contingent order of the universe, nature, society and individual identity, vocation and estate, subsequent on God's creative and sustaining activity, was commonplace. Every kind of trees herbs birds beasts and fishes have a peculiar disposition appropered unto them by God their creator; so that in everything is order, and without order may be nothing stable or permanent. The two interrelated themes of the Order which God eternally is in Himself, and the Order of created realities which, contingent on the Divine Order, is expressed in Common or Natural Law, cannot be considered narrowly, as if they existed in neat compartments in the mentality of the age.
