Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”
Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture: “How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”
(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.
An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are “more than can be numbered” (Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497. Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.” Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.” So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.
Armstrong, God and the Soul: “God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.” Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panorama some where, for the beholding of some one.” Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that “there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known” (Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God “the night shineth as the day” (Ps. 139:12).
Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was [pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the French cachot as the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The text Gen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us. Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”
(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.
God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”
Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”
(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.