Speaking of prayer, Origen says,

Suppose that a righteously minded physician is at the side of a sick man praying for health, with knowledge of the right mode of treatment for the disease about which the man is offering prayer. It is manifest that he will be moved to heal the suppliant, surmising, it may well be not idly, that God has had this very action in mind in answer to the prayer of the suppliant for release from the disease. Or suppose that a man of considerable means, who is generous, hears the prayer of a poor man offering intercession to God for his wants. It is plain that he, too, will fulfill the objects of the poor man’s prayer, becoming a minister of the fatherly counsel of Him who at the season of the prayer had brought together him who was to pray and him who was able to supply and by virtue of the rightness of his principles, incapable of overlooking one who has made that particular request.

The fact that the person’s prayers appear to have been answered by chance, Origen maintains, is merely an appearance. Since God is the cause of all things, he is also the cause, directly or indirectly, of all that results from those things, and consequently of these supposedly chance answers to prayer.

Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, argues thus:

It is to no purpose, that the proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest that grows upon them. The homely and vulgar proverb, that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with regard to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets, which are employed in the oeconomy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

The inequality of wealth among men, Smith is arguing, is much less than it first appears. There may be a man who theoretically has a million times your personal wealth. But he cannot eat a million times as much as you, but only a little more, if at all. And likewise, in a somewhat analagous manner, in respect to wealth in all the ways in which it touches an individual. And consequently the benefit that comes from that wealth can be, and will be, distributed among other men, not in a perfectly equal manner, but in a manner far closer to equality than one would first suppose.

Smith asserts here that it is the “invisible hand” of Providence that has intentionally designed a world that must have these results. The terminology of the “invisible hand” is used by some modern economists in a more general way, simply speaking of the way in which good results can come about without the explicit intention of the persons concerned, without necessarily intending to say that the good results were intended in any sense, by Providence or anything else.

In reality, however, both Adam Smith and Origen are correct. All things come from the first cause. Nothing is lost on account of the fact that things proceed through secondary causes as well; on the contrary, this only makes everything better.