"it is not with respect to our convenience or discomfort, but with respect to their own nature, that the creatures are glorifying to their Artificer."

      St. Augustine, De civ. Dei 12.4, trans. Dodds.  CSEL 40.1, 572:

"Non . . . ex commodo uel incommodo nostro, sed per se ipsam considerata natura dat artifici suo gloriam."

Considered not from [the point of view of] our convenience or inconvenience, but for the sake of itself [alone] does [a given] nature give the Maker his glory.

Trans. Bettenson:

"it is the nature of things considered in itself, without regard to our convenience or inconvenience, that gives glory to the Creator."

     Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Havard University Press, 2007), 342-343:

     The story [of the apologists of modern 'design-argument' 'Providential Deism'] runs on, accumulating more and more detail, and gradually gets ridiculous.  God appears as a fussy parent, anxiously moulding every detail of creation to our well-being and comfort.  The rebellion cannot but come, but it often is made by people who still believe in design in general, like Voltaire, but cannot stomach the ludicrous detail, and above all, the absence of any place in the story for the tragedies that life itself produces, like the famous earthquake at Lisbon.

     Now, the earlier understanding of the world as God-produced cosmos wasn't open to these attacks.  This ealier view wove the history of world events in secular time into the framework of higher times.  The things and happenings of our world had a depth in God's eternity which they lost when the sense of this faded.  At the same time, it was understood that God had other purposes than our well-being; and indeed, some of his purposes for us included chastisement, both as retribution and as training.  What was abundantly clear was that we couldn't hope to reason all this out on our own.  Much of the modern design-argument would have been unthinkable earlier.  It arose in the context of a post-Galilean or -Newtonian science, which hoped to fathom God's providence in its own terms.