Chapter I: The Attributes Of God (4)

Edwards the younger, Works, 1:386, 387—“There is no succession in
the divine mind; therefore no new operations take place. All the
divine acts are from eternity, nor is there any time with God. The
_effects_ of these divine acts do indeed all take place in time
and in a succession. If it should be said that on this supposition
the effects take place not till long after the acts by which they
are produced, I answer that they do so in our view, but not in the
view of God. With him there is no time; no before or after with
respect to time: nor has time any existence in the divine mind, or
in the nature of things independently of the minds and perceptions
of creatures; but it depends on the succession of those
perceptions.” We must qualify this statement of the younger
Edwards by the following from Julius Müller: “If God’s working can
have no relation to time, then all bonds of union between God and
the world are snapped asunder.”

It is an interesting question whether the human spirit is capable
of timeless existence, and whether the conception of time is
purely physical. In dreams we seem to lose sight of succession; in
extreme pain an age is compressed into a minute. Does this throw
light upon the nature of prophecy? Is the soul of the prophet rapt
into God’s timeless existence and vision? It is doubtful whether
_Rev. 10:6—_“there shall be time no longer” can be relied upon to
prove the affirmative; for the Rev. Vers. marg. and the American
Revisers translate “there shall be delay no longer.” Julius
Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:147—“All self-consciousness is a victory over
time.” So with memory; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:471. On “the
death-vision of one’s whole existence,” see Frances Kemble
Butler’s experience in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:351—“Here there is
succession and series, only so exceedingly rapid as to seem
simultaneous.” This rapidity however is so great as to show that
each man can at the last be judged in an instant. On space and
time as unlimited, see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 564-566. On the
conception of eternity, see Mansel, Lectures, Essays and Reviews,
111-126, and Modern Spiritualism, 255-292; New Englander, April,
1875: art. on the Metaphysical Idea of Eternity. For practical
lessons from the Eternity of God, see Park, Discourses, 137-154;
Westcott, Some Lessons of the Rev. Vers., (Pott, N. Y., 1897),
187—with comments on αἰῶνες in _Eph. 3:21_, _Heb. 11:3_, _Rev. 4_;
_10, 11_—“the universe under the aspect of time.”

2. Immensity.

By this we mean that God’s nature (_a_) is without extension; (_b_) is subject to no limitations of space; and (_c_) contains in itself the cause of space.

_1 Kings 8:27—_“behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot
contain thee.” Space is a creation of God; _Rom. 8:39—_“nor height
nor depth, nor any other creature.” Zahn, Bib. Dogmatik,
149—“Scripture does not teach the immanence of God in the world,
but the immanence of the world in God.” Dante does not put God,
but Satan at the centre; and Satan, being at the centre, is
crushed with the whole weight of the universe. God is the Being
who encompasses all. All things exist in him. E. G. Robinson:
“Space is a relation; God is the author of relations and of our
modes of thought; therefore God is the author of space. Space
conditions our thought, but it does not condition God’s thought.”

Jonathan Edwards: “Place itself is mental, and within and without
are mental conceptions.... When I say the material universe exists
only in the mind, I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the
conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as
spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence
on, the conception of other minds.” H. M. Stanley, on Space and
Science, in Philosophical Rev., Nov. 1898:615—“Space is not full
of things, but things are spaceful.... Space is a form of dynamic
appearance.” Bradley carries the ideality of space to an extreme,
when, in his Appearance and Reality, 35-38, he tells us: Space is
not a mere relation, for it has parts, and what can be the parts
of a relation? But space is nothing but a relation, for it is
lengths of lengths of—nothing that we can find. We can find no
terms either inside or outside. Space, to be space, must have
space outside itself. Bradley therefore concludes that space is
not reality but only appearance.

Immensity is infinity in its relation to space. God’s nature is not subject to the law of space. God is not in space. It is more correct to say that space is in God. Yet space has an objective reality to God. With creation space began to be, and since God sees according to truth, he recognizes relations of space in his creation.

Many of the remarks made in explanation of time apply equally to
space. Space is not a substance nor an attribute, but a relation.
It exists so soon as extended matter exists, and exists as its
necessary condition, whether our minds perceive it or not. Reid,
Intellectual Powers, essay 2, chap. 9—“Space is not so properly an
object of sense, as a necessary concomitant of the objects of
sight and touch.” When we see or touch body, we get the idea of
space in which the body exists, but the idea of space is not
furnished by the sense; it is an _a priori_ cognition of the
reason. Experience furnishes the occasion of its evolution, but
the mind evolves the conception by its own native energy.

Anselm, Proslogion, 19—“Nothing contains thee, but thou containest
all things.” Yet it is not precisely accurate to say that space is
in God, for this expression seems to intimate that God is a
greater space which somehow includes the less. God is rather
unspatial and is the Lord of space. The notion that space and the
divine immensity are identical leads to a materialistic conception
of God. Space is not an attribute of God, as Clarke maintained,
and no argument for the divine existence can be constructed from
this premise (see pages 85, 86). Martineau, Types, 1:138, 139,
170—“Malebranche said that God is the place of all spirits, as
space is the place of all bodies.... Descartes held that there is
no such thing as empty space. _Nothing_ cannot possibly have
extension. Wherever extension is, there must be _something_
extended. Hence the doctrine of a _plenum_, A _vacuum_ is
inconceivable.” Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysics, 87—“According to
the ordinary view ... space _exists_, and things exist _in it_;
according to our view, only things exist, and _between them_
nothing exists, but space exists _in them_.”

Case, Physical Realism, 379, 380—“Space is the continuity, or
continuous extension, of the universe as one substance.” Ladd: “Is
space extended? Then it must be extended in some other space. That
other space is the space we are talking about. Space then is not
an entity, but a mental presupposition of the existence of
extended substance. Space and time are neither finite nor
infinite. Space has neither circumference nor centre,—its centre
would be everywhere. We cannot _imagine_ space at all. It is
simply a precondition of mind enabling us to perceive things.” In
Bib. Sac., 1890:415-444, art.: Is Space a Reality? Prof. Mead
opposes the doctrine that space is purely subjective, as taught by
Bowne; also the doctrine that space is a certain order of
relations among realities; that space is nothing apart from
things; but that things, when they exist, exist in certain
relations, and that the sum, or system, of these relations
constitutes space.

We prefer the view of Bowne, Metaphysics, 127, 137, 143, that
“Space is the form of objective experience, and is nothing in
abstraction from that experience.... It is a form of intuition,
and not a mode of existence. According to this view, things are
not in space and space-relations, but appear to be. In themselves
they are essentially non-spatial; but by their interactions with
one another, and with the mind, they give rise to the appearance
of a world of extended things in a common space. Space-predicates,
then, belong to phenomena only, and not to
things-in-themselves.... Apparent reality exists spatially; but
proper ontological reality exists spacelessly and without spatial
predicates.” For the view that space is relative, see also Cocker,
Theistic Conception of the World, 66-96; Calderwood, Philos. of
the Infinite, 331-335. _Per contra_, see Porter, Human Intellect,
662; Hazard, Letters on Causation in Willing, appendix; Bib. Sac.,
Oct. 1877:723; Gear, in Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434; Lowndes,
Philos. of Primary Beliefs, 144-161.

Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.

1. Omnipresence.

By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.

_Ps. 139:7 __sq.__—_“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or
whither shall I flee from thy presence?” _Jer. 23:23, 24—_“Am I a
God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I
fill heaven and earth?” _Acts 17:27, 28—_“he is not far from each
one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”
Faber: “For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is
within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him
as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond
Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself
Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth
Myself God’s sanctuary.” Henri Amiel: “From every point on earth
we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.” Tennyson, The
Higher Pantheism: “Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit
with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than
hands and feet.” “As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”

The atheist wrote: “God is nowhere,” but his little daughter read
it: “God is now here,” and it converted him. The child however
sometimes asks: “If God is everywhere, how is there any room for
us?” and the only answer is that God is not a material but a
spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence
but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence
of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in
Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that
God would be with him in a distant land (_Heb. 11:8_). Jacob
learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went
(_Gen. 28:15_). Jesus taught that “neither in this mountain, nor
in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”_ (John 4:21)_. Our
Lord’s mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were
intended to teach his disciples that he was with them “always,
even unto the end of the world”_ (Mat. 28:20)_. The omnipresence
of Jesus demonstrates, _a fortiori_, the omnipresence of God.

In explanation of this attribute we may say:

(_a_) God’s omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God’s essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to “dwell in the heavens,” we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.

_Ps. 123:1—_“O thou that sittest in the heavens”; _113:5—_“That
hath his seat on high”; _Is. 57:15—_“the high and lofty One that
inhabiteth eternity.” Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as
well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea, “at
home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.” We do not need to
go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up
(_Rom. 10:6, 7_). The best illustration is found in the presence
of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to
the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from
idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact
with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought
to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All
believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all
parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less
difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body.
An animal’s brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet,
after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the
whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were
confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to
cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or
even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the
universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of
the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite;
and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in
every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its
acts.” This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in
all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God’s
omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this
omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke,
Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able
to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place....
Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God
would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God
anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all
prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”

So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a
single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of
the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be
regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not affect
our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted
when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one
point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above
is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are
divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159,
holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of
bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt. “Pflüger
and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their
intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so
the intelligence of the spinal cord’s acts must really be due to
the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”
Professor Brewer’s rattlesnake, after several hours of
decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he
attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog’s
leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?
“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after
decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.” Hudson,
Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond,
Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not
the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively
in the brain; it is seated in the _medulla oblongata_, or in the
spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson
thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when
the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by
animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born
without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The
brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence
that points to the brain as the _principal_ seat of consciousness
points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or
elsewhere as the seat of a more or less _subordinate_
consciousness or intelligence.” Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I
do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined
to the brain.”

In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the
general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side.
Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points
of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from
a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of
the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the
eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead
of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it
is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately
closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”
William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the
brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be
any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a
consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals
this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far
as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the
cortex of the brain.” See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a
Body, 40-50.

(_b_) God’s omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.

_1 Kings 8:27—_“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot
contain (circumscribe) thee.” God must be present in all his
essence and all his attributes in every place. He is “totus in
omni parte.” Alger, Poetry of the Orient: “Though God extends
beyond Creation’s rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”
From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be
present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills
and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be
united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as
if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.

A. J. Gordon: “In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its
parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the
whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as
much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”
_Mat. 13:20—_“where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them.” “The parish priest of austerity
Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he
might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he
daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it
down on the people’s heads Two times one day in seven. In his age
God said, ‘Come down and die,’ And he cried out from the steeple,
‘Where art thou, Lord?’ And the Lord replied, ‘Down here among my
people.’ ”

(_c_) God’s omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.

God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy
the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in
all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is
the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this
pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an
essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by
God’s transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an
elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the
stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God’s personal presence with his
church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the
worship of Jehovah: “The idol seems so near, but is so far,
Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!” God’s omnipresence assures
us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart
and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers,
Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136;
Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.

The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying: “I have learned
to call nothing on earth lovely.” But this is to despise not only
the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing
in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a
present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are
nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is
God’s omnipresence in space, as evolution is God’s omnipresence in
time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent,
contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and
contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and
move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent
source of our existence.” _Rom. 10:6-8—_“Say not in thy heart, Who
shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who
shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from
the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth,
and in thy heart.” Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in
Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:
“Is God in my pocket?” “Certainly.” “No, he isn’t, for I haven’t
any pocket.” God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe,
but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.

2. Omniscience.

By this we mean God’s perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.

God knows his inanimate creation: _Ps. 147:4—_“counteth the number
of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.” He has
knowledge of brute creatures: _Mat. 10:29_—sparrows—“not one of
them shall fall on the ground without your Father.” Of men and
their works: _Ps. 33:13-15—_“beholdeth all the sons of men ...
considereth all their works.” Of hearts of men and their thoughts:
_Acts 15:8—_“God, who knoweth the heart”; _Ps.
139:2—_“understandest my thought afar off.” Of our wants: _Mat.
6:8—_“knoweth what things ye have need of.” Of the least things:
_Mat. 10:30—_“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Of
the past: _Mal. 3:16—_“book of remembrance.” Of the future: _Is.
46:9, 10—_“declaring the end from the beginning.” Of men’s future
free acts: _Is. 44:28—_“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and
shall perform all my pleasure.” Of men’s future evil acts: _Acts
2:23—_“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God.” Of the ideally possible: _1 Sam.
23:12—_“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the
hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up” (_sc._
if thou remainest); _Mat. 11:23—_“if the mighty works had been
done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”
From eternity: _Acts 15:18—_“the Lord, who maketh these things
known from of old.” Incomprehensible: _Ps. 139:6—_“Such knowledge
is too wonderful for me”; _Rom. 11:33—_“O the depth of the riches
both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.” Related to wisdom:
_Ps. 104:24—_“In wisdom hast thou made them all”; _Eph.
3:10—_“manifold wisdom of God.”

_Job 7:20—_“O thou watcher of men”; _Ps. 56:8—_“Thou numberest my
wanderings” = my whole life has been one continuous exile; “Put
thou my tears into thy bottle” = the skin bottle of the
east,—there are tears enough to fill one; “Are they not in thy
book?” = no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has
gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt: “Du zählst wie oft ein Christe
wein’, Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so
klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.” _Heb. 4:13—_“there is no
creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are
naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to
do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as
animals slaughtered in sacrifice, _or_ seized by the throat and
thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether
there was any blemish. Japanese proverb: “God has forgotten to
forget.”

(_a_) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God’s omniscience.

It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a
relative and transitive attribute, does not include God’s
self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God’s
knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his
creation. H. A. Gordon: “Light travels faster than sound. You can
see the flash of fire from the cannon’s mouth, a mile away,
considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear.
God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word,
and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”

Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one
who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary
and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an
all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own
truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the
fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”

Browning, Ferishtah’s Fancies, Plot-culture: “How will it fare
shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And
each, to make the minute’s deed, word, thought As worthy of reward
and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad
daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe
within the Ear, With black night’s help around me?”

(_b_) Since it is free from all imperfection, God’s knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.

An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an
absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol,
memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge
is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly
represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as
being eye. His thoughts toward us are “more than can be numbered”_
(Ps. 40:5)_, not because there is succession in them, now a
remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a
moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is
always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497. _Gen.
16:13—_“Thou art a God that seeth.” Mivart, Lessons from Nature,
374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its
existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God,
that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science
together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of
such divine contemplation.” So God’s scrutiny of every deed of
darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of
spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would
be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.

Armstrong, God and the Soul: “God’s energy is concentrated
attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two
or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same
time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another.
God attends to all things, does all things, at once.” Marie
Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every
scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panorama
_some where_, for the beholding of _some one_.” Wireless
telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are
hid, that “there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed;
and hid, that shall not be known”_ (Mat. 10:26)_. The Röntgen
rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our
clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God
“the night shineth as the day”_ (Ps. 139:12)_.

Professor Mitchel’s equatorial telescope, slowly moving by
clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and
disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all
unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing
was so fearful to the prisoner in the French _cachot_ as the eye
of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence
through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole
world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to
the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the
government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But
omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The text _Gen.
16:13—_“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from
evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it
should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should
as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an
exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who
understands us, loves us, and helps us. _Ps. 139:17, 18—_“How
precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the
sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than
the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”

(_c_) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.

God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now
present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a
different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been,
had we made different decisions in the past (_Is. 48:18—_“Oh that
thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”).
Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his
universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his
own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space,
a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of
succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is
also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events
as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and
knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things
simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not
temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite
beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at
one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and
future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal
knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an
object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action
can be foreseen involves the denial of God’s own free agency,
since God’s future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while
God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those
actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye
which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the
green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh,
if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of
life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might
I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That
Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”

(_d_) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men’s acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.

Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of
contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he
admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the
objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number
those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain,
such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot
be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present
condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by
natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will
strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws,
cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only
in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John
Milton seems also to deny God’s foreknowledge of free acts: “So,
without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably
foreseen, They trespass.”

With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in
his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future
Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the
principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this
surrender of God’s foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of
fulfilled prophecy, like Peter’s denial and Judas’s betrayal, God
brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that
Peter’s and Judas’s wills acted irresponsibly under the law of
cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that
“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential
complement of the Methodist theology, without which its
philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical
consistency of Calvinism.” See also article by McCabe in Methodist
Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God
has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know
as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain
extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has
himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring, ‘What
will he do?’ ”

So Dugald Stewart: “Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the
power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take
place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?” Martensen
holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who
declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing
the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion,
2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no
basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows
the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not
know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To
him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.” Then,
says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as
to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is
rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight
or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze
does not deny God’s foreknowledge of free human actions, but he
regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation
of time to God, and such foreknowledge as “one of those postulates
as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.” Bowne,
Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a
knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption
of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this
difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by
suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an
eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time,
its condition.”

Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our
fundamental conviction of God’s perfection, but the constant
testimony of Scripture. In _Is. 41:21, 22_, God makes his
foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with
idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then “the Lamb that
hath been slain from the foundation of the world”_ (Rev. 13:8)_
was only a sacrifice to be offered _in case_ Adam should fall, God
not knowing whether he would or not, and _in case_ Judas should
betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed,
since the course of nature is changed by man’s will when he burns
towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even
the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against
this view.

How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say,
but then the method of God’s knowledge in many other respects is
unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God
may foreknow free acts:—

1. _Mediately_, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this
either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or
(2) certainly. This last “certainly” is to be accepted, if either;
since motives are never _causes_, but are only _occasions_, of
action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be
said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not
foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather.
Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to
motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at
the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such
cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them
gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is
therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God
may foreknow free acts:—

2. _Immediately_, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius
Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future
event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be
allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of
man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in
question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was
not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be
regarded as _intuitive_, we see that it stands in the same
immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and
thus the difficulty is removed.” Even upon this view there still
remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God’s
mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to
which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet,
in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and
by our fundamental idea of God’s perfection to maintain God’s
perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With
President Pepper we say: “Knowledge of contingency is not
necessarily contingent knowledge.” With Whedon: “It is not
calculation, but pure knowledge.” See Dorner, System of Doct.,
1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605;
Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a
valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view
that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac.,
Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.

(_e_) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.

Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than
seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events,
we may say with Whedon: “Knowledge _takes_ them, not _makes_
them.” Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination,
but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his
Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that “the knowledge of God is the cause of
things”; but he is obliged to add: “God is not the cause of all
things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by
God are not from him.” John Milton, Paradise Lost, book
3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no
less proved certain unforeknown.”

(_f_) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.

God does not know what the result would be if two and two made
five, nor does he know “whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum
devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that
he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are
not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God
make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked
while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2
= 5?” Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the
whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills
there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round
squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and
Abracadabras?”

(_g_) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated “wisdom.” In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.

Wisdom is not simply “estimating all things at their proper value”
(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose.
It has been defined as “the talent of using one’s talents.” It
implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly,
choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self
and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony
of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the
reception of facts that are found in things.” Thus man’s wisdom,
obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same
thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and
holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism
pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not
enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the
nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce
well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of
nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more
than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a
lion.”

3. Omnipotence.

By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.

_Gen. 17:1—_“I am God Almighty.” He performs natural wonders:
_Gen. 1:1-3—_“Let there be Light”; _Is. 44:24—_“stretcheth forth
the heavens alone”; _Heb. 1:3—_“upholding all things by the word
of his power.” Spiritual wonders: _2 Cor. 4:6—_“God, that said,
Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;
_Eph. 1:19—_“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who
believe”; _Eph. 3:20—_“able to do exceeding abundantly.” Power to
create new things: _Mat. 3:9—_“able of these stones to raise up
children unto Abraham”. _Rom. 4:17—_“giveth life to the dead, and
calleth the things that are not, as though they were.” After his
own pleasure: _Ps. 115:3—_“He hath done whatsoever he hath
pleased”; _Eph. 1:11—_“worketh all things after the counsel of his
will.” Nothing impossible: _Gen 18:14—_“Is anything too hard for
Jehovah?” _Mat. 19:26—_“with God all things are possible.” E. G.
Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is
dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible
to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his
own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is
not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a
just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the
authority of a positive revelation.”

The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy
Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire.
The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion
of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind
at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore
everything before him on the first day of creation (_Gen. 1:2_;
_John 3:8_; _Acts 2:2_). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened
to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and
there was not room enough to receive that which fell (_Mal.
3:10_). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that
shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (_Mat. 3:11_;
_2 Pet. 3:7-13_). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.

(_a_) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.

Self-contradictory things: “facere factum infectum”—the making of
a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of
praying: “May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter
than a straight line between two given points; putting two
separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things
contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to
die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God
has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all
power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be
said by man than this: “I dare do all that may become a man; Who
dares do more is none.” Even God cannot make wrong to be right,
nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the
prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and
therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold
the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of
Decrees.

Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven
itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words
applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:
“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”
Sunday-school scholar: “Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big
that he can’t lift it?” Seminary Professor: “Can God tell a lie?”
Seminary student: “With God all things are possible.”

(_b_) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.

Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine
causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no
causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual.
This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza’s _natura
naturans_ and _natura naturata_. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used
according to God’s pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the
laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own
being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a
will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all
that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to “raise
up children unto Abraham,” but he has not done it. In God are
unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings,
new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has
expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his
omnipotence. So _Job 26:14—_“Lo, these are but the outskirts of
his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the
thunder of his power who can understand?” See Rogers, Superhuman
Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.

_1 Pet. 5:6—_“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of
God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he
may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him,
because he careth for you.” “The mighty powers held under mighty
control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is
not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint
is the true power. _Prov. 16:32—_“He that is slow to anger is
better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he
that taketh a city.” Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power
in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to
do.” When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve.
God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of
wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.

(_c_) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God’s power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

Thomasius: “If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself
be all.” _Ps. 113: 5, 6—_“Who is like unto Jehovah our God....
That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and
in the earth?” _Phil. 2:7, 8—_“emptied himself ... humbled
himself.” See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey
showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an
offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly,
Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his
life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which
proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.” We
are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love’s
sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well
as of fear, on the part of God’s creatures. Isaac Watts: “His
every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The
voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”

Third Division.—Attributes having relation to Moral Beings.

1. Veracity and Faithfulness, or Transitive Truth.

By veracity and faithfulness we mean the transitive truth of God, in its twofold relation to his creatures in general and to his redeemed people in particular.

_Ps. 138:2—_“I will ... give thanks unto thy name for thy
lovingkindness and for thy truth: For thou hast magnified thy word
above all thy name”; _John 3:33—_“hath set his seal to this, that
God is true”; _Rom. 3:4—_“let God be found true, but every man a
liar”; _Rom. 1:25—_“the truth of God”; _John 14:17—_“the Spirit of
truth”; _1 John 5:7—_“the Spirit is the truth”; _1 Cor. 1:9—_“God
is faithful”; _1 Thess. 5:24—_“faithful is he that calleth you”;
_1 Pet. 4:19—_“a faithful Creator”; _2 Cor. 1:20—_“how many soever
be the promises of God, in him is the yea”; _Num. 23:19—_“God is
not a man that he should lie”; _Tit. 1:2—_“God, who cannot lie,
promised”; _Heb. 6:18—_“in which it is impossible for God to lie.”

(_a_) In virtue of his veracity, all his revelations to creatures consist with his essential being and with each other.

In God’s veracity we have the guarantee that our faculties in
their normal exercise do not deceive us; that the laws of thought
are also laws of things; that the external world, and second
causes in it, have objective existence; that the same causes will
always produce the same effects; that the threats of the moral
nature will be executed upon the unrepentant transgressor; that
man’s moral nature is made in the image of God’s; and that we may
draw just conclusions from what conscience is in us to what
holiness is in him. We may therefore expect that all past
revelations, whether in nature or in his word, will not only not
be contradicted by our future knowledge, but will rather prove to
have in them more of truth than we ever dreamed. Man’s word may
pass away, but God’s word abides forever (_Mat. 5:18—_“one jot or
one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law”; _Is.
40:8—_“the word of God shall stand forever”).