mpossible to God will not stand the test as soon as we
ask seriously whether God can make the untrue true,--as making two times
two to equal five--or whether He can declare the wrong to be right.
Obviously He cannot overturn the laws of mathematical truth or of moral
truth, without at the same time losing His nature as the Source and
Essence of all truth. Nor can He abrogate the laws of nature, which are
really His own rules for His creation, without detracting from both His
omniscience and the immutability of His will. This question will be
discussed more fully in connection with miracles, in chapter XXVII.

Together with the problem of the divine omniscience arises the difficulty
of reconciling this with our freedom of will and our moral responsibility.
Would not His foreknowledge of our actions in effect determine them? This
difficulty can only be solved by a proper conception of the freedom of the
will, and will be discussed in that connection in chapter XXXVII.

Altogether, we must guard against applying our human type of knowledge to
God. Man, limited by space and time, obtains his knowledge of things and
events by his senses, becoming aware of them separately as they exist
either beside each other or in succession. With God all knowledge is
complete; there is no growth of knowledge from yesterday to to-day, no
knowledge of only a part instead of the whole of the world. His
omniscience and omnipotence are bound up with His omnipresence and
eternity. "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My
ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are
My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts."(239)

Chapter XV. God's Omnipresence and Eternity

1. As soon as man awakens to a higher consciousness of God, he realizes
the vast distance between his own finite being limited by space and time,
and the Infinite Being which rules everywhere and unceasingly in lofty
grandeur and unlimited power. His very sense of being hedged in by the
bounds and imperfections of a finite existence makes him long for the
infinite God, unlimited in might, and brings to him the feeling of awe
before His greatness. But this conception of God as the omnipresent and
everlasting Spirit, as distinct from any created being, is likewise the
result of many stages of growing thought.

2. The primitive mind imagines God as dwelling in a lofty place, whence He
rules the earth beneath,