effected without any new design or change of purpose on God's
part._
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 shalt 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.