Curiosities of Heat

by Lyman Beecher Tefft

“He wished me to ask how it was possible for man not to sin and fall if God placed him in a world prepared for a race of sinners and unfitted for a sinless race. He said that in such a case, if man had remained obedient, the plans of God would have been disarranged.”

“What answer did you try to give him, Ansel?”

“I did not try to make any explanation. It seemed to me a very great objection. I did not see how such a course was consistent with God’s righteousness.”

“And you are not the first person who has objected to this as a great inconsistency. I am afraid the discussion will take more time than we ought to spare, but now that the question has been asked and the objection presented, I must take time to answer it, even if it consume the whole half hour.

“In considering this subject, as well as many others, we need to remember that the existence of difficulties is no objection to a principle or a fact. Difficulties wholly inexplicable by man attend facts and principles which must be true. A fact may be incomprehensible, though undeniable. The great Doctor Johnson said, ‘There are insuperable objections against a plenum, and insuperable objections against a vacuum, yet one of these must be true.’ What did he mean by that, Samuel?”

“He meant, I suppose, that we could not explain the possibility that any space should be wholly empty of matter, and could no more explain the possibility that any space should be filled with matter, but that all space must be filled, or else there must be empty space. Whether we can explain the possibility or not, one of them must be true.”

“That is right. The same is true of many other facts besides a plenum and a vacuum. We cannot conceive of infinite space; we cannot conceive that space should not be infinite, but bounded. We cannot conceive of the creation of the world from nothing, and no more can we conceive of its eternal existence. The truth is that the mind of man cannot grasp such subjects so as to reason upon them correctly. No sooner do we attempt to reason about the infinite things of God than we run into absurdities and reach the most contradictory conclusions. And in this respect it makes no difference with what principle or proposition we start if it only contain some infinite element. Let me give you a simple illustration from geometry—an illustration which, very likely, is familiar to you: the larger a circle, the less is the curvature of the line which bounds it; that is, the more nearly does that line approach a straight line. An infinite circle must be bounded by a straight line, because with any degree of curvature the circle would be less than infinite. But a straight line cannot bound a circle. The attempt to reason about an infinite circle brings us at once to the most palpable absurdities and contradictions. Or take this illustration: the whole of a thing is greater than any of its parts. But divide a line of infinite length in the middle, and each part is infinite. We reach the conclusion either that the half is equal to the whole or that other wholly incomprehensible proposition, that one infinity is twice as great as another infinity. I have made these statements to show you that the existence of difficulties does not indicate, much less prove, that a fact is not real and true.

“Mr. Hume thinks the fact that the earth existed in its present condition before men sinned an insuperable objection to the view that this world was prepared as a place for the discipline of a fallen race. But let us look at the other side, and see if equal objections do not exist. The Creator foresaw the fall of man; is there no objection to the supposition that, knowing that man would sin, God made no provision for it? On the one supposition he foresees the evil and makes no provision; on the other, he foresees it and provides for the catastrophe. The former supposition certainly involves the greater difficulties.

“The objector may reply that the plan of God, by embracing the fall of man and including it as one of its essential elements, made that fall necessary. But why should not God embrace in his plan that great event, the fall of man, which he foresaw in the future? Would it have been wiser and better to leave out of account that most stupendous fact in the history of the human race? This same objection, which Mr. Hume and many others have brought forward, lies with equal force against the great central fact of the gospel, the death of Christ. God’s plan touching this world included the incarnation and death of his Son. Jesus, the ‘Lamb of God,’ is spoken of as ‘slain from the foundation of the world.’ Rev. xiii. 8. But the incarnation and death of Christ presuppose the apostasy of the human race. Did this plan touching Christ make the apostasy of man a necessity? If preparing a world—fallen, so to speak, beforehand—for a race which God foresaw would fall, be inconsistent with his righteousness, it must be equally inconsistent to prepare a Saviour beforehand for that same race.

“Again, the divine plan touching the death of his Son included his betrayal by Judas and his crucifixion by the Jews. If Judas had known that God had poised the salvation of man upon the pivot of his treachery, he would doubtless have argued as Mr. Hume and others are accustomed to do. But did God’s plan excuse his treason against his Lord? His own conscience, piercing and rending his soul with remorse, drove him to self-destruction, and Christ confirmed the sentence of his conscience and called him the ‘son of perdition.’ The fact that God weaves the foreseen crimes of men into his plans is no palliation of their guilt.