God says: “I show My pity through divine law, not through human. It is My sympathy with and My knowledge of harmony (not inharmony) which alone enable Me to rebuke, and eventually destroy, every supposition of discord.”
Error says: “God must know death, in order to strike at its root;” but God saith: “I am ever-conscious Life, and thus I conquer death; for to be ever conscious of Life is to be never conscious of death. I am All. A knowledge of aught beside Myself is impossible.”
If such knowledge of evil were possible to God, it would lower His rank.
With God, knowledge is necessarily foreknowledge; and foreknowledge and foreordination must be one, in an Infinite Being. What Deity foreknows Deity must foreordain; else He is not omnipotent, and, like ourselves. He foresees events which are contrary to His creative will, yet which He can not avert.
If God knows evil at all, He must have had foreknowledge thereof; and if He foreknew it, He must virtually have intended it, or ordered it aforetime, — foreordained it; else how could it have come into the world?
