The idea of the possibilities of human action in the Middle English Patience rests on a strictly providential view of history. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is part of a larger scheme, invisible to him, in which he has little confidence. The irony of the prophet's failure to understand or trust God's moral and historical purposes is deepened by the fact that he is a figure of Christ. Jonah's blindness to God's immediate purpose—salvation for the Ninevites—is foolish, but his ignorance of his own typological significance is inevitable, for that significance cannot be realized until the incarnation of Christ. Thus patience, the virtue in which Jonah fails so badly, is not simply a dull acquiescence in present necessity, but a sure faith in an eternal order not merely obscure but unimagined except by God. A brief reading of the poem shows that the contours of this faith are defined by those three of God's attributes which characterize the moral quality of events in the world he orders: his power, justice, and mercy.