contriver

That swindling Pumblechook, exalted into the beneficent contriver of the whole occasion, actually took the top of the table; and, when he addressed them on the subject of my being bound, and had fiendishly congratulated them on my being liable to imprisonment if I played at cards, drank strong liquors, kept late hours or bad company, or indulged in other vagaries which the form of my indentures appeared to contemplate as next to inevitable, he placed me standing on a chair beside him to illustrate his remarks.

Robert Boyle asked: And how will it be prov’d, that the Omniscient God, or that admirable Contriver, Nature, can exhibit Phaenomena by no wayes, but such as are explicable, by the dim Reason of Man?

Yet it is still hard for the reader to get truly inside the mind of this complex Kennedy, somehow both a “Machiavellian contriver and man of conscience”.

“The country did by no means resemble that of an uninhabited and uncultivated place; but had much more the air of a magnificent plantation, where large lawns and stately woods had been laid out together with great skill, and where the whole had been so artfully combined, and so judiciously adapted to the slopes of the hills and the inequalities of the ground, as to produce a most striking effect, and to do honour to the invention of the contriver.”

Even if we could discover a predominance of benevolence in the creation, we should still regard the mingled attributes of nature as a reflex of the mingled attributes of its Contriver.