A short grammar of providence

[Extract] The Providence of God is a book that only David Fergusson could have composed, showing and sharing his immense generosity of mind, which greets and engages ideas wherever it finds them, and especially among the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotsmen, who are treated almost like family. The book is a historical overview over past understandings of providence, both remembered and widely forgotten, issuing in a new account of the doctrine that Fergusson variously calls ‘chastened’ and ‘polyphonic’. As we will see, the tension between images of extravagance and restraint here is not accidental, but indicative of his project.