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wealth of Cathay and Cipango was the allurement he spread before them. True, he mentioned the possible Christianization of the people of these countries, but only as a subordinate inducement. Gold, jewels, pearls, and spices were presented to them as their chief inducements to attempt his proposed discovery.

This dominant selfism which marked his bargaining with Spain characterized his administration as viceroy. He captured and enslaved helpless Indians that he might present them at the Spanish court as trophies of his discoveries. When he needed cattle he most cruelly packed five hundred of the poor Indians in the hold of a small vessel and sent them to be sold as slaves in the market of Seville, directing the proceeds to be sent him in cattle. He also compelled the Indians to dig in the mines and toil in the fields. He authorized a system of forced labor, which resulted in a mortality so sweeping that at the time of his death the populations of some of the islands he had discovered were very nearly annihilated. To fill their places he provided for the importation of Negroes from Africa. Thus he became the father of American slavery, with its infamous slave trade, and, through the ultimate results of this slave system, of the deadly war of the late rebellion! He sowed dragons' teeth which have produced innumerable hosts of armed men.

But was not Columbus a Christian? Judged by the moral standards of his times and by the sentimental ritualism of Romanism he may be so named. But placed in the ethical balances of the New Testament, and viewed in the light of a humanizing spirituality, one cannot regard him as having very defensible claims to Christian sainthood. What he was in the sight of Him who reads the spirits of men no man can conclusively decide. But while no one is bound to view him as a model for imitation all may very properly think of him as a bold, brave, self-determined man to whom it was given to be the providential instrument of what Fiske describes as "a unique event in the history of mankind. Nothing like it was ever done before, and nothing like it can ever be done again."

Pamil

Daniel Wise

ART. VII.-PRESCIENCE OF FUTURE CONTINGENCIES

IMPOSSIBLE.

Ir law, penalty, and moral government are realities the disobedience of Adam left him incapable of making for himself a satisfactory atonement, or of renewing his fallen nature in the divine likeness. God having withdrawn from his soul, there could be no recuperating power in him by which he could regain his lost affinities for holiness. To secure his salvation an atonement for his guilt and a recreating power and process in his nature were indispensable. Without atonement there could be no access to the divine throne, and without an incipient change in his spirit he could not be responsive to divine instructions and entreaties. Should the Ruler still hold him as an accountable being he must guarantee to him perfect freedom of choice between obedience and disobedience. And to make his salvation from unholy affinities possible he must be brought unconditionally into a state of partial moral change, to give to freedom the impulse and the illumination necessary to originate choice between evil and good.

Unless some incipient moral change pass in a depraved soul it could not choose holiness; and if it could not, then it would not be free. A salvable state requires initial moral changes in the soul of a probationer. Without these supernal helps man never could originate a choice of obedience. As in Adam we all died, so in Christ we are all made alive-alive enough to be responsive to the calls and entreaties of God; and, therefore, he is the Saviour of all men, and especially of those who believe. Salvation unto the uttermost is promised believers. The great atonement must leave man under grace just as free to choose holiness as he was when under the economy and probation of works. If he is not he cannot avail himself of the proffers of salvation. The salubrious sound of the Gospel could never attract his depraved ear. A great change actually passed in the nature of fallen man in the atoning sacrifice. He is not, therefore, under the deed of redemption, totally depraved. Total depravity is that state of the soul wholly des titute of a desire for holiness.

When Christ first created man he endowed him with the

perfect freedom of personality. And when he redeemed him he placed that boon of liberty back into his soul, and man once more stood before his Creator and Redeemer a sovereign person. Man as a fallen, hopeless being is very different from man as a redeemed being. A perfect freedom, as an unconditional benefit of the atonement, was essential to a valid probation on the plane of free grace. Man, under the atoning sacrifice, being perfectly free, he is the absolute genesis of his own choice between competing motives.

Choice logically necessitates the coming to pass of contingent events. A contingency is an event that might come to pass, with an equal possibility of its opposite, or something else, coming to pass. Either may come to pass, but neither has yet come to pass. Neither is an existing thing. A possible event may or may not come to pass. If it cannot be certain to come to pass, it is uncertain in its nature. If it is uncertain to come to pass, that uncertainty must attach to the nature of the event. God's conception of a thing is always identical with the nature of that thing, and therefore God's conception of the event is that uncertainty attaches to it. If its uncertainty is objective it must be subjectively uncertain. Can a thing be different from God's conception of it? Can he escape regarding a contingent, possible event as uncertain? Can God regard an uncertainty as a present certainty, or an actuality? An actuality involves substance and attribute, but an uncertainty cannot possibly involve either substance or attribute. A non-existing thing cannot be an object of knowledge, for knowledge of a reality is the certainty that that reality necessitates in the mind. But this is impossible unless the thing has a positive existence. And if it has a positive existence it can never be otherwise than as it is. Hence, to assume that God intuits all free events from eternity to eternity is without a shadow of proof. A contingency must be, just what Richard Rothe the greatest man, Dr. Schaff says, that Germany has produced since Schleiermacher-declared it to be, "a nothing," and, therefore, "unknowable." Can God know a contingent event before that event takes place? Rothe answered: "No; because there is nothing to know until it does take place." Dr. Dorner says: "No; for in the divine omniscience there must be an element of growth. In the world God 50-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. VIII.

must live an historic life that is conditioned by man's life of freedom."

If man is an accountable being he can of himself originate a moral or immoral force. If he originate a force, moral or immoral, before its origin it was a possibility, but it could have no incipiency. Before its origin its incipiency was a nonentity. If its incipiency was a nonentity it was unknowable. If God could know one nonentity he could know millions of nonentities, and this would fill the infinite mind with millions of nonentities, which is an evident absurdity.

A B will go east, states a simple fact. A B will go east or west, is a proposition that affirms an alternation, one or the other, but neither of which is now certain. If it is now certain that A B will go east, then the proposition, A B will go east or west, does not express an alternation, which is all it does express. The alternation being destroyed, the proposition is meaningless and wholly delusive. The only way by which it can be known which route A B will take is to enter his consciousness and witness his actual determination in the contingency before him. The choice can never be an object of knowledge until the choice is elected and originated by A B. If God's conception of the nature of an event is that it is uncertain, then all the knowledge he can have of such an event is that it is uncertain. For him to affirm certainty of an event that is uncertain in its nature violates the law of selfcontradiction.

Assuming the possible prescience of a nonentity necessitates a denial of the likeness between the mental movement of man and the mental movements of Deity exercised upon the same subject of inquiry. This denial will break the force of innumerable teachings of revelation. When I teach endless punishment as Christ taught it I am told, "God's mind does not regard this subject as we do, and no doubt in the infinite resources of the infinite intellect he has a way to prevent such a terrible destiny." Such utterances have sadly paralyzed the teachings of our Lord on this momentous subject. I teach that worship is not acceptable unless we worship the Father as God, the Son as God, and the Holy Ghost as God; but I am told, "God has such a way of looking at the teachings of the Bible on the subject of worship that to him Christ is not God."

But a refusal to worship the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost has ever been strangely attended with indistinctness of religious experience. How can God foreknow a contingency? With united voice Calvinists escape the incoherency of Arminians by assuming and affirming that God knows the future choice of A B because it is in his sovereign eternal decrees. But to the question, How does God foreknow? Arminians reply: "Finite intellectual movement is no criterion by which to judge the movement of an infinite intellect; and though the finite cannot conceive how God can foreknow an absolute nonentity, nevertheless the infinite mind may; for man never did and never could have any conception of an infinite intellect." But God assumes the similarity between the finite and the infinite intellectual movements when he says, "Come, let us reason together." When we reason we must look at things, facts, and subjects as they really are. The things and our conception of them must resemble each other sufficiently to be identified, or reasoning is estopped. The same must be true of the state of mind of Him with whom we reason. When God says, "Come, let us reason together," things must lie in his mind as they lie in ours, and he and we must reason from the same premises and according to the necessary laws of thought. If to us the prescience of contingencies involves and necessitates self-contradiction, the same contradiction must inevitably result and rest in the mind of God. If you deny this your reasoning with the Deity is unreliable, and therefore useless.

It is dangerous to solve a difficulty by assuming an absurdity. If we assume one absurdity it will necessitate the assumption of another absurdity to escape the consequences of the first. Has God anywhere affirmed his prescience of the future volitions of man? If he has I have never been able to find such affirmation. A justly distinguished professor of theology, when frequently and sorely pressed for a text supporting infallible prescience, gave a long list of passages, not one of which has the slightest reference to a future contingency.

Many without investigation have regarded the divine inability to foreknow contingencies as an imperfection of omniscience. A careful study reveals that a limitation in prescience is one of his perfections. It also removes innumerable imperfections in the moral character of God, eliminates the

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