S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Foreknowledge
God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come: for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless; and understanding of his adversity, he would be senseless.
God’s … prescience or foresight of any action of mine, or rather his science or sight from all eternity, lays no necessity on anything to come to pass.
We all foreknow that the sun will rise and set; that all men born into the world shall die again; that after winter the spring shall come; after the spring, summer and harvest; yet is not our foreknowledge the cause of any of those.
It would puzzle the greatest philosopher that ever was, to give any tolerable account how any knowledge whatsoever can certainly and infallibly foresee an event through uncertain and contingent causes.
