This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ...as near to touching the great Reality as anything we know. If so, God's prescience must extend to all possibilities of disaster, and against the results of all possible disaster He must provide. God's re-creating influence on His creatures must be unceasing though not coercive. CHAPTER X OMNIPOTENCE ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ...as near to touching the great Reality as anything we know. If so, God's prescience must extend to all possibilities of disaster, and against the results of all possible disaster He must provide. God's re-creating influence on His creatures must be unceasing though not coercive. CHAPTER X OMNIPOTENCE LET us try to get at what we may hold to be the best symbol of omnipotence by considering first, and ascending from, the simplest type of power we know. _ Most of us have in the back of our minds crude ideas of power gained in the earlier years of the race or the individual. We are apt to have a vague idea that omnipotence exercised toward humanity would be like a nurse who can lift the body of a child from one place in a room to another, place it in a sunny Window or dark closet, and give it a smile or a frown, a shake or a cake, to mould its behaviour.-Well, let us analyse this idea! Let us take a nurse training a child, and analyse her conduct. She shows three sorts of power in an ascending scale: first, the power to change the place of matter, which can equally well be applied to any sort of matter; second, the power to adjust her conduct to the moulding of the child's behaviour; third, the power to conceive of the effect to be thus produced. The first might be exercised by the wind on an autumn leaf, or by steam on an engine. The second seems to be instinctively exercised by many animals toward their young. The third can only be imagined as rudimentary in the more intelligent animals; it is to be clearly observed only in man. A ain, let us consider what is involved in the powei-I of the nurse to conceive how she wants the child to behave. She might wish to produce in the child--(1) feeble conduct, e.g. such conduct as is...
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