HIS life, he said, had been a series of "providential accidents".
He transferred to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1828, where his mentors mostly endorsed the idea of providential design.
Byington's sardonic view of love and cynical look at life plans nonetheless (as the title suggests) is balanced by an Olympian vision of providential possibilities.
Some of the most interesting gardens are a result of providential disasters, says Mac Griswold, a garden historian in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and Manhattan.
"But essentially it's a poem about hope, and about the sort of providential accident of one life being planted in another and making new things possible".
The extra stratum of heartbreak in Adi's life is his parents: they had him in late middle-age when Ramli was killed, and seemed to regard his birth as some kind of providential divine gesture of comfort.
That idea of the providential nature of the development of science in this country was just one of the many revelations for me in that quartet of programmes.
The Qurʾān, the sacred text of Islam, contains allusions that constitute the basis of a providential history of humankind from Adam through Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
It is a "vicissitude" of hopes and despair that is part of the providential regime of the world established by God (De utilitate ex adversis capienda, OO, II, 26a).
This doctrine of the providential ordering of the universe, reaffirmed in Rabbinic Judaism, is not without its difficulties, as in the liturgical change made in Isaiah 45:7 to avoid ascribing evil to God.
