* Why God is represented to us as if he sprang from the
temporal and the visible 161-163.

* We cannot explore God's nature 163.

* In what pictures God reveals himself in the Old
Testament, and in the New 164.

* The will of God in signs and the will of God's good
pleasure, "signs" and "Beneplaciti."

(a) How we can know God's will in signs 165-166.

(b) Why we cannot know the will of God's pleasure, nor
fathom it 165-166.

(c) What is really to be understood by the will in
signs 167.

b. The way the schools explain these words 168.

c. How they are to be rightly understood 169.

* Disputing about God's majesty and omnipotence places man
in a dangerous position 169-171.

* How man should hold to the signs by which God revealed
himself 171.

* What the will of God's pleasure is, to what it serves and
how it is revealed in Christ 172-176.

* The will of good pleasure of which the fathers speak
cannot comfort the heart 175.

* The only view of the Godhead possible in this life 176.

d. In what sense it can be said that "it repented Jehovah
that he had made man" 177.

IV. THE REPENTANCE AND GRIEF OF GOD BECAUSE HE HAD MADE MAN.

A. The Repentance of God.

Vs. 5-6. _And Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was
only evil continually. And it repented Jehovah that he had made man on
the earth, and it grieved him at his heart._

140. This is the passage which we have used against "free will," of
which Augustine writes that without the grace of the Holy Spirit it
can do nothing but sin. The scholastics, however, the champions of
free will, are not only hard beset by this clear passage, but also by
the authority of Augustine, and they sweat. Of Augustine they say that
his language is hyperbolical, as Basil writes of one who in refuting
the other side had gone too far, that he did like the farmers; they
when trying to straighten out crooked branches bend them a little too
far on the other side; and so Augustine, in beating back the
Pelagians, is asserted to have spoken more severely against free will
in the defense