Part 4 — Chapter I. The Attributes Of God. (continued 2)

(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.

As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving. James 1:5—“God, who giveth,” or “the giving God” (τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only to give, but to give himself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.

Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.” When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.

(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.

Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source. Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character. [pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.” Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.

Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta: “He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”

(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.

Christ is “the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8); 1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.” While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”; Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”; Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”; cf. Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.

But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers: ‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’ ” Christ was “anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,” and “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved. “Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”

In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him: “I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?” Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which [pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.

Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that “The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,” and we can say with the Psalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,” and with Isaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”

Borden P. Bowne, Atonement: “Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is not love at all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”

Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the world will be tragic, it shall still, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.” Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor: “O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”

On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142. Per [pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.

3. Holiness.

Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.

Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”; 19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God; Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7); 2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”; 1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”; 4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”; Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.

That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,” for Schurman himself had just said: “A God without moral character is no God at all.” Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.” See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.

The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism: “There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was ‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’ But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes [pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.

In further explanation we remark:

A. Negatively, that holiness is not

(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.

Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as “summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute. Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as in Lev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.” When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first; John 8:29 illustrates the second: “he that sent me is with me.” Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’ (1 John 1:5) indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”

Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simply demands in law, but imparts in the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.” We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.

(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.

Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness, i. e., “no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.” Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher: “Holiness = wholeness.” Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.” This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.

[pg 270]

A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.” As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”

(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.

Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it, i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.

We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's “moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's “perfect goodness” (Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.

G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that “God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.” Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.” In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is not love at all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.” Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.

Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards [pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.

(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.

That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.” In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares: “Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.

Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.” So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.

God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that “love is the desire to impart holiness.” Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true, vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that “holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say: “Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.

[pg 272]

That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne” (Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error. Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne” = in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. In Mat. 6:9, 10, “Thy kingdom come” is not the first petition, but rather, “Hallowed be thy name.” It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.

That God is only love has been called “the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is “a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms” (Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation. John 17:11—“Holy Father” = more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes: “Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”

There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.

At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is “a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29) to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”; Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”; 36:21, 22—in [pg 273]judgment “I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”; 1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness; Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”; 16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”; 19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”). See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.

B. Positively, that holiness is

(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; God is pure before he wills purity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.” Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. He is law. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.” We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.” Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do not rule intellect, but only express what intellect is.”

In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316): “God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.” Whedon therefore believes, not in God's unchangeableness, but in God's unchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.” P. S. Moxom: “Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.” H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”

(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.

As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer [pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is “a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but “a glassy sea mingled with fire.” A. J. Gordon: “Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are ‘without fault before the throne’ are they who ‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.” Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”; “God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.” See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.

The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.

Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is no a priori good before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, not before, but in, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness. John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as “the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,” and holiness in men as “the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”

(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely [pg 275]good being—his being like himself.” Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.” We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.

The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances as Job 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”; 31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.” The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose. Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.” On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.

VI. Relative or Transitive Attributes.

First Division.—Attributes having relation to Time and Space.

1. Eternity.

By this we mean that God's nature (a) is without beginning or end; (b) is free from all succession of time; and (c) contains in itself the cause of time.

Deut. 32:40—“For I lift up my hand to heaven, And say, As I live forever....”; Ps. 90:2—“Before the mountains ... from everlasting ... thou art God”; 102:27—“thy years shall have no end”; Is. 41:4—“I Jehovah, the first, and with the last”; 1 Cor. 2:7—πρὸ τῶν αἰώνων—“before the worlds” or “ages” = πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου—“before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). 1 Tim. 1:17—Βασιλεῖ τῶν αἰώνων—“King of the ages” (so also Rev. 15:8). 1 Tim. 6:16—“who only hath immortality.” Rev. 1:8—“the Alpha and the Omega.” Dorner: “We must not make Kronos (time) and Uranos (space) earlier divinities before God.” They are among the “all things” that were “made by him ” (John 1:3). Yet time and space are not substances; neither are they attributes (qualities of substance); they are rather relations of finite existence. (Porter, Human Intellect, 568, prefers to call time and space “correlates to beings and events.”) With finite existence they come into being; they are not mere regulative conceptions of our minds; they exist objectively, whether we perceive them or not. Ladd: “Time is the mental presupposition of the duration of events and of objects. Time is not an entity, or it would be necessary to suppose some other time in which it endures. We think of space and time as unconditional, because they furnish the conditions of our knowledge. The age of a son is conditioned on the age of his father. The conditions themselves cannot be conditioned. Space and time are mental forms, but not only that. There is an extra-mental something in the case of space and time, as in the case of sound.”

Ex. 3:14—“I am”—involves eternity. Ps. 102:12-14—“But thou, O Jehovah, wilt abide forever.... Thou wilt arise, and have mercy upon Zion; for it is time to have pity upon her.... For thy servants ... have pity upon her dust” = because God is eternal, he will have compassion upon Zion: he will do this, for even we, her children, love her very dust. Jude 25—“glory, majesty, dominion and power, before all time, and now, and for evermore.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:165—“God is ‘King of the æons’ (1 Tim. 1:17), because he distinguishes, in his thinking, his eternal inner essence from his changeable working in the world. He is not merged in the process.” Edwards [pg 276]the younger describes timelessness as “the immediate and invariable possession of the whole unlimited life together and at once.” Tyler, Greek Poets, 148—“The heathen gods had only existence without end. The Greeks seem never to have conceived of existence without beginning.” On precognition as connected with the so-called future already existing, and on apparent time progression as a subjective human sensation and not inherent in the universe as it exists in an infinite Mind, see Myers, Human Personality, 2:262 sq. Tennyson, Life, 1:322—“For was and is and will be are but is: And all creation is one act at once, The birth of light; but we that are not all, As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that, And live perforce from thought to thought, and make The act a phantom of succession: there Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time.”

Augustine: “Mundus non in tempore, sed cum tempore, factus est.” There is no meaning to the question: Why did creation take place when it did rather than earlier? or the question: What was God doing before creation? These questions presuppose an independent time in which God created—a time before time. On the other hand, creation did not take place at any time, but God gave both the world and time their existence. Royce, World and Individual, 2:111-115—“Time is the form of the will, as space is the form of the intellect (cf. 124, 133). Time runs only in one direction (unlike space), toward fulfilment of striving or expectation. In pursuing its goals, the self lives in time. Every now is also a succession, as is illustrated in any melody. To God the universe is ‘totum simul’, as to us any succession is one whole. 233—Death is a change in the time-span—the minimum of time in which a succession can appear as a completed whole. To God ‘a thousand years’ are ‘as one day’ (2 Pet. 3:8). 419—God, In his totality as the Absolute Being, is conscious not, in time, but of time, and of all that infinite time contains. In time there follow, in their sequence, the chords of his endless symphony. For him is this whole symphony of life at once.... You unite present, past and future in a single consciousness whenever you hear any three successive words, for one is past, another is present, at the same time that a third is future. So God unites in timeless perception the whole succession of finite events.... The single notes are not lost in the melody. You are in God, but you are not lost in God.” Mozart, quoted in Wm. James, Principles of Psychology, 1:255—“All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream. But the best of all is the hearing of it all at once.”

Eternity is infinity in its relation to time. It implies that God's nature is not subject to the law of time. God is not in time. It is more correct to say that time is in God. Although there is logical succession in God's thoughts, there is no chronological succession.

Time is duration measured by successions. Duration without succession would still be duration, though it would be immeasurable. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay 3, chap. 5—“We may measure duration by the succession of thoughts in the mind, as we measure length by inches or feet, but the notion or idea of duration must be antecedent to the mensuration of it, as the notion of length is antecedent to its being measured.”God is not under the law of time. Solly, The Will, 254—“God looks through time as we look through space.” Murphy, Scientific Bases, 90—“Eternity is not, as men believe, Before and after us, an endless line. No, 'tis a circle. Infinitely great—All the circumference with creations thronged: God at the centre dwells, beholding all. And as we move in this eternal round, The finite portion which alone we see Behind us, is the past; what lies before We call the future. But to him who dwells Far at the centre, equally remote From every point of the circumference, Both are alike, the future and the past.” Vaughan (1655): “I saw Eternity the other night. Like a great ring of pure and endless light. And calm as it was bright; and round beneath it Time in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.”

We cannot have derived from experience our idea of eternal duration in the past, for experience gives us only duration that has had beginning. The idea of duration as without beginning must therefore be given us by intuition. Case, Physical Realism, 379, 380—“Time is the continuance, or continual duration, of the universe.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 39—Consider time as a stream—under a spatial form: “If you take time as a relation between units without duration, then the whole time has no duration, and is not time at all. But if you give duration to the whole time, then at once the units themselves are found to possess it, and they cease to be units.” The [pg 277] now is not time, unless it turns past into future, and this is a process. The now then consists of nows, and these nows are undiscoverable. The unit is nothing but its own relation to something beyond, something not discoverable. Time therefore is not real, but is appearance.

John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 1:185—“That which grasps and correlates objects in space cannot itself be one of the things of space; that which apprehends and connects events as succeeding each other in time must itself stand above the succession or stream of events. In being able to measure them, it cannot be flowing with them. There could not be for self-consciousness any such thing as time, if it were not, in one aspect of it, above time, if it did not belong to an order which is or has in it an element which is eternal.... As taken up into thought, succession is not successive.” A. H. Strong, Historical Discourse, May 9, 1900—“God is above space and time, and we are in God. We mark the passage of time, and we write our histories. But we can do this, only because in our highest being we do not belong to space and time, but have in us a bit of eternity. John Caird tells us that we could not perceive the flowing of the stream if we were ourselves a part of the current; only as we have our feet planted on solid rock, can we observe that the water rushes by. We belong to God; we are akin to God; and while the world passes away and the lust thereof, he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” J. Estlin Carpenter and P. H. Wicksteed, Studies in Theology, 10—“Dante speaks of God as him in whom ‘every where and every when are focused in a point’, that is, to whom every season is now and every place is here.”

Amiel's Journal: “Time is the supreme illusion. It is the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode by which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.... Time is the successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the successive analysis of an intuition, or of an act of the will. In itself it is relative and negative, and it disappears within the absolute Being.... Time and space are fragments of the Infinite for the use of finite creatures. God permits them that he may not be alone. They are the mode under which creatures are possible and conceivable.... If the universe subsists, it is because the eternal Mind loves to perceive its own content, in all its wealth and expression, especially in its stages of preparation.... The radiations of our mind are imperfect reflections from the great show of fireworks set in motion by Brahma, and great art is great only because of its conformities with the divine order—with that which is.”

Yet we are far from saying that time, now that it exists, has no objective reality to God. To him, past, present, and future are “one eternal now,” not in the sense that there is no distinction between them, but only in the sense that he sees past and future as vividly as he sees the present. With creation time began, and since the successions of history are veritable successions, he who sees according to truth must recognize them.

Thomas Carlyle calls God “the Eternal Now.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 30—“God is not contemptuous of time.... One day is with the Lord as a thousand years. He values the infinitesimal in time, even as he does in space. Hence the patience, the long-suffering, the expectation, of God.” We are reminded of the inscription on the sun-dial, in which it is said of the hours: “Pereunt et imputantur”—“They pass by, and they are charged to our account.” A certain preacher remarked on the wisdom of God which has so arranged that the moments of time come successively and not simultaneously, and thus prevent infinite confusion! Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:344, illustrates God's eternity by the two ways in which a person may see a procession: first from a doorway in the street through which the procession is passing; and secondly, from the top of a steeple which commands a view of the whole procession at the same instant.

S. E. Meze, quoted in Royce, Conception of God, 40—“As if all of us were cylinders, with their ends removed, moving through the waters of some placid lake. To the cylinders the waters seem to move. What has passed is a memory, what is to come is doubtful. But the lake knows that all the water is equally real, and that it is quiet, immovable, unruffled. Speaking technically, time is no reality. Things seem past and future, and, in a sense, non-existent to us, but, in fact, they are just as genuinely real as the present is.” Yet even here there is an order. You cannot play a symphony backward and have music. This qualification at least must be put upon the words of Berkeley; “A succession of ideas I take to constitute time, and not to be only the sensible measure thereof, as Mr. Locke and others think.”

[pg 278]

Finney, quoted in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:722—“Eternity to us means all past, present and future duration. But to God it means only now. Duration and space, as they respect his existence, mean infinitely different things from what they do when they respect our existence. God's existence and his acts, as they respect finite existence, have relation to time and space. But as they respect his own existence, everything is here and now. With respect to all finite existences, God can say: I was, I am, I shall be, I will do; but with respect to his own existence, all that he can say is: I am, I do.”

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.

[pg 279]

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.

[pg 280]

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 [pg 281]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.’ ”

[pg 282]

(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 [pg 283]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 [pg 284]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.”