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What wonder is it if, entangled in these circles, they find neither
entrance nor egress? For they know not how the human race, and this
mortal condition of ours, took its origin, nor how it will be brought
to an end, since they cannot penetrate the inscrutable wisdom of God.
For, though Himself eternal, and without beginning, yet He caused
time to have a beginning; and man, whom He had not previously made
He made in time, not from a new and sudden resolution, but by His
unchangeable and eternal design. Who can search out the unsearchable
depth of this purpose, who can scrutinize the inscrutable wisdom,
wherewith God, without change of will, created man, who had never
before been, and gave him an existence in time, and increased the
human race from one individual? For the Psalmist himself, when he
had first said, "Thou shalt keep us, O Lord, Thou shall preserve
us from this generation for ever," and had then rebuked those whose
foolish and impious doctrine preserves for the soul no eternal
deliverance and blessedness adds immediately, "The wicked walk in a
circle." Then, as if it were said to him, "What then do you
believe, feel, know? Are we to believe that it suddenly occurred to
God to create man, whom He had never before made in a past eternity,
God, to whom nothing new can occur, and in whom is no
changeableness?" the Psalmist goes on to reply, as if addressing
God Himself, "According to the depth of Thy wisdom Thou hast
multiplied the children of men." Let men, he seems to say, fancy
what they please, let them conjecture and dispute as seems good to
them, but Thou hast multiplied the children of men according to the
depth of thy wisdom, which no man can comprehend. For this is a depth
indeed, that God always has been, and that man, whom He had never
made before, He willed to make in time, and this without changing
His design and will.
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