Thomas Carlyle calls God “the Eternal Now.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 30—“God is not contemptuous of time.... One day is with the Lord as a thousand years. He values the infinitesimal in time, even as he does in space. Hence the patience, the long-suffering, the expectation, of God.” We are reminded of the inscription on the sun-dial, in which it is said of the hours: “Pereunt et imputantur”—“They pass by, and they are charged to our account.” A certain preacher remarked on the wisdom of God which has so arranged that the moments of time come successively and not simultaneously, and thus prevent infinite confusion! Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:344, illustrates God's eternity by the two ways in which a person may see a procession: first from a doorway in the street through which the procession is passing; and secondly, from the top of a steeple which commands a view of the whole procession at the same instant.
S. E. Meze, quoted in Royce, Conception of God, 40—“As if all of us were cylinders, with their ends removed, moving through the waters of some placid lake. To the cylinders the waters seem to move. What has passed is a memory, what is to come is doubtful. But the lake knows that all the water is equally real, and that it is quiet, immovable, unruffled. Speaking technically, time is no reality. Things seem past and future, and, in a sense, non-existent to us, but, in fact, they are just as genuinely real as the present is.” Yet even here there is an order. You cannot play a symphony backward and have music. This qualification at least must be put upon the words of Berkeley; “A succession of ideas I take to constitute time, and not to be only the sensible measure thereof, as Mr. Locke and others think.”
Finney, quoted in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:722—“Eternity to us means all past, present and future duration. But to God it means only now. Duration and space, as they respect his existence, mean infinitely different things from what they do when they respect our existence. God's existence and his acts, as they respect finite existence, have relation to time and space. But as they respect his own existence, everything is here and now. With respect to all finite existences, God can say: I was, I am, I shall be, I will do; but with respect to his own existence, all that he can say is: I am, I do.”
Edwards the younger, Works, 1:386, 387—“There is no succession in the divine mind; therefore no new operations take place. All the divine acts are from eternity, nor is there any time with God. The effects of these divine acts do indeed all take place in time and in a succession. If it should be said that on this supposition the effects take place not till long after the acts by which they are produced, I answer that they do so in our view, but not in the view of God. With him there is no time; no before or after with respect to time: nor has time any existence in the divine mind, or in the nature of things independently of the minds and perceptions of creatures; but it depends on the succession of those perceptions.” We must qualify this statement of the younger Edwards by the following from Julius Müller: “If God's working can have no relation to time, then all bonds of union between God and the world are snapped asunder.”
It is an interesting question whether the human spirit is capable of timeless existence, and whether the conception of time is purely physical. In dreams we seem to lose sight of succession; in extreme pain an age is compressed into a minute. Does this throw light upon the nature of prophecy? Is the soul of the prophet rapt into God's timeless existence and vision? It is doubtful whether Rev. 10:6—“there shall be time no longer” can be relied upon to prove the affirmative; for the Rev. Vers. marg. and the American Revisers translate “there shall be delay no longer.” Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:147—“All self-consciousness is a victory over time.” So with memory; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:471. On “the death-vision of one's whole existence,” see Frances Kemble Butler's experience in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:351—“Here there is succession and series, only so exceedingly rapid as to seem simultaneous.” This rapidity however is so great as to show that each man can at the last be judged in an instant. On space and time as unlimited, see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 564-566. On the conception of eternity, see Mansel, Lectures, Essays and Reviews, 111-126, and Modern Spiritualism, 255-292; New Englander, April, 1875: art. on the Metaphysical Idea of Eternity. For practical lessons from the Eternity of God, see Park, Discourses, 137-154; Westcott, Some Lessons of the Rev. Vers., (Pott, N. Y., 1897), 187—with comments on αἰῶνες in Eph. 3:21, Heb. 11:3, Rev. 4; 10, 11—“the universe under the aspect of time.”
2. Immensity.
By this we mean that God's nature (a) is without extension; (b) is subject to no limitations of space; and (c) contains in itself the cause of space.
1 Kings 8:27—“behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee.” Space is a creation of God; Rom. 8:39—“nor height nor depth, nor any other creature.” Zahn, Bib. Dogmatik, 149—“Scripture does not teach the immanence of God in the world, but the immanence of the world in God.” Dante does not put God, but Satan at the centre; and Satan, being at the centre, is crushed with the whole weight of the universe. God is the Being who encompasses all. All things exist in him. E. G. Robinson: “Space is a relation; God is the author of relations and of our modes of thought; therefore God is the author of space. Space conditions our thought, but it does not condition God's thought.”
Jonathan Edwards: “Place itself is mental, and within and without are mental conceptions.... When I say the material universe exists only in the mind, I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence on, the conception of other minds.” H. M. Stanley, on Space and Science, in Philosophical Rev., Nov. 1898:615—“Space is not full of things, but things are spaceful.... Space is a form of dynamic appearance.” Bradley carries the ideality of space to an extreme, when, in his Appearance and Reality, 35-38, he tells us: Space is not a mere relation, for it has parts, and what can be the parts of a relation? But space is nothing but a relation, for it is lengths of lengths of—nothing that we can find. We can find no terms either inside or outside. Space, to be space, must have space outside itself. Bradley therefore concludes that space is not reality but only appearance.