do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but _fatal_
decrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as
actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those
two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled
even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; {181}
and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be
from all eternity.

An analogy will make the meaning of this clear. Suppose two men before
a chessboard,--the one a novice, the other an expert player of the
game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what
any one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all
the _possible_ moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet
each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of
victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how
devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the
novice's king.

Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for
the infinite mind in which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to be
thinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose him
to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not _now_[10]
decide on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguous
possibilities shall be left {182} open, _either_ of which, at a given
instant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcations
become real, I know what I shall do at the _next_ bifurcation to keep
things from drifting away from the final result I intend.[11]

The creator's plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many
of its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down. The
realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that
is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came.
Other possibilities would be _contingently_ determined; that is, their
decision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters of
absolute chance fell out. But the rest of the plan, including its
final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all. So the
creator himself would not need to know _all_ the details of actuality
until they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be a
view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is
now. Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his
world was safe,