Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Efficiency isn’t a productivity hack here; it’s a theological claim with a blade in it. When William Ames says God’s “decree...comes first,” he’s not offering an abstract metaphysics so much as asserting the Puritan-Reformed order of reality: God doesn’t react, improvise, or negotiate with events. He wills, and history follows. Calling this “the most perfect of all” isn’t decorative praise; it’s an argument that divine causality must be prior, total, and internally consistent, because anything less would smuggle contingency into God and make providence look like crisis management.

The subtext is polemical. Early 17th-century Protestant Europe was full of fights over whether grace depends on human cooperation, whether God foreknows choices or determines them, whether salvation is ultimately secured by divine initiative or human assent. Ames, a rigorous Reformed scholastic and influential Puritan voice, writes into that battlefield with a calm, juridical tone: the “decree” functions like the constitution of the cosmos. It doesn’t just predict outcomes; it authorizes them.

Why does the sentence work? Because it fuses austerity with flattery. “Efficiency” and “manner of working” sound almost administrative, as if God’s governance could be diagrammed, then the language pivots to “notably agrees with the divine nature,” making logical necessity feel like reverence. The rhetorical move reassures believers: a world that looks chaotic is, at the deepest level, already ordered - not by chance, not by us, but by a perfection that cannot be second-guessed.