Can it be seriously held, by any thinker, that long after God made the
universe,--earth, man, animals, plants, the sun, the moon, and "the stars
also,"--He should so gain wisdom and power from past experience that He
could vastly improve upon His own previous work,--as Burgess, the
boatbuilder, remedies in the Volunteer the shortcomings of the Puritan's
model?

Christians are commanded to _grow in grace_. Was it necessary for God to
grow in grace, that He might rectify His spiritual universe?

The Jehovah of limited Hebrew faith might need repentance, because His
created children proved sinful; but the New Testament tells us of "the
Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
God is not the shifting vane on the spire, but the corner-stone of living
rock, firmer than everlasting hills.

As God is Mind, if this Mind is familiar with evil, all cannot be good
therein. Our infinite model would be taken away. What is in eternal Mind
must be reflected in man, Mind's image. How then could man escape, or hope
to escape, from a knowledge which is everlasting in his creator?

God never said that man would become better by learning to distinguish evil
from good,--but the contrary, that by this knowledge, by man's first
disobedience, came "death into the world, and all our woe."

"Shall mortal man be more just than God?" asks the poet-patriarch. May men
rid themselves of an incubus which God never can throw off? Do mortals know
more than God, that they may declare Him absolutely cognizant of sin?