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He falls sick again, and foreknows the day of his death. The nature of his sickness, and how he was inwardly disposed. He entertains himself with God in the extremity of his sickness. He denounces to a young Indian, the unhappy death which was attending him. The Death of the Saint. His age and person. Of the duties which were paid him immediately after his decease.
A free moral agent, all whose volitions and actions, are fixed by an immutable decree! We are ignorant how God knows, or how he foreknows. Perhaps past and future relate only to creatures, Every thing may be present to the divine mind with God there may be an eternal Now.
In what condition he found the town, and what he did in order to reform it. He labours with success at Malacca. He revives a dead maid. He receives letters from Europe by the new missioners who are sent him. He defers the voyage to Macassar, and designs another. He foreknows, and foretels the ruin of Malacca. He goes to Amboyna, and what happens to him in his voyage.
Again: “To suppose the future volitions of moral agents,” says President Edwards, “not to be necessary events; or, which is the same thing, events which are not impossible but that they may not come to pass; and yet to suppose that God certainly foreknows them, and knows all things, is to suppose God’s knowledge to be inconsistent with itself.
He suggests to himself false hopes of never too late, as if he could command either time or repentance, and dare defer the expectation of mercy, till betwixt the bridge and the water. Give him but where to set his foot, and he will remove the earth. He foreknows the mutations of states, the events of war, the temper of the seasons; either his old prophecy tells it him, or his stars.
Man ascribes to God the faculty of foreseeing, or knowing beforehand whatever will happen; but this prescience seldom turns to his glory, nor protects him from the lawful reproaches of man. If God foreknows the future, must he not have foreseen the fall of his creatures?
At the head of the article was a wood-cut of a gigantic nose, mapped out into faculties. "Gentlemen, the nose is the most prominent feature in this bill," commenced the parody. "The nose is the true seat of the mind; and therefore, gentlemen, Nosology, or the science of the nose, is the true phrenology. He, who knows his nose, foreknows; for he knows that which is before him.
Human life is a fertile field for tragedy. The more we rid the narratives of their fairy-story accompaniments and see Jesus, not as a god who foreknows his human life and plays it out gravely as an actor who knows his role, but as a human being hurried to issues he had not at first dreamed of, the more his career becomes comprehensible.
It is, of course, far from infallible; it cannot dominate circumstances, and has no discursive knowledge; but it is presumably true, and what it foreknows is always essentially possible. Unrealisable it may indeed be in the jumbled context of this world, where the Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
And were it reasonable to affirm, that by a perfection he is disabled from government? or were it a good consequence, ‘He foreknows all things—he is therefore unfit to govern the world?’ ”
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