r, to speak more accurately, are in
themselves necessarily both inexpressible and inconceivable, but are
suggested by two contradictory positions. This is the essential
character of all ideas, consequently of eternity, in which the
attributes of omniscience and omnipotence are included. Now prescience
and freewill are in fact nothing more than the two contradictory
positions by which the human understanding struggles to express
successively the idea of eternity. Not eternity in the negative sense as
the mere absence of succession, much less eternity in the senseless
sense of an infinite time; but eternity,--the Eternal; as Deity, as God.
Our theologians forget that the objection applies equally to the
possibility of the divine will; but if they reply that prescience
applied to an eternal, 'Entis absoluti tota et simultanea fruitio', is
but an anthropomorphism, or term of accommodation, the same answer
serves in respect of the human will; for the epithet human does not
enter into the syllogism. As to contingency, whence did Mr. Davison
learn that it is a necessary accompaniment of freedom, or of free
action? My philosophy teaches me the very contrary.

Ib. p. 392.

He contends, without reserve, that the free actions of men are not
within the divine prescience; resting his doctrine partly on the
assumption that there are no strict and absolute predictions in
Scripture of those actions in which men are represented as free and
responsible; and partly on the abstract reason, that such actions are
in their nature impossible to be certainly foreknown.

I utterly deny contingency except in relation to the limited and
imperfect knowledge of man. But the misery is, that men write about
freewill without a single meditation on will absolutely; on the idea
[Greek: katt' exochaen] without any idea; and so bewilder themselves in
the jungle of alien conceptions; and to understand the truth they
overlay their reason.

Disc. VIII. p. 416.

It would not be easy to calculate the good which a man like Mr. Davison
might effect, under God, by a work on the Messianic Prophecies,
specially intended for and addressed to the present race of Jews,--if
only he would make himself acquainted with their objections and ways of
understanding Scripture. For instance, a learned Jew would perhaps
contend that this prophecy of Isaiah (c. ii. 2-4,) cannot fairly be
interpreted of a mere local origination of a religion historically; as