The other thing he repeateth is, that “the best way to reconcile contingency and liberty with the prescience and decrees of God, is to subject future contingents to the aspect of God”. The same is also my opinion, but contrary to what he hath all this while laboured to prove. For hitherto he held liberty and necessity, that is to say, liberty and the decrees of God, irreconcilable; unless the aspect of God (which word appeareth now the first time in this discourse) signify somewhat else besides God’s will and decree, which I cannot understand. But he adds, that we must subject them “according to that presentiality which they have in eternity”; which he says cannot be done by them that conceive eternity to be an everlasting succession, but only by them that conceive it an indivisible point. To this I answer, that as soon as I can conceive eternity to be an indivisible point, or any thing but an everlasting succession, I will renounce all I have written on this subject. I know St. Thomas Aquinas calls eternity _nunc stans_, an _ever abiding now_; which is easy enough to say, but though I fain would, I never could conceive it; they that can, are more happy than I. But in the mean time he alloweth hereby all men to be of my opinion, save only those that conceive in their minds a _nunc stans_; which I think are none. I understand as little, how it can be true that “God is not just, but justice itself, not wise but wisdom itself, not eternal but eternity itself”: nor how he concludes thence that “eternity is a point indivisible, and not a succession”: nor in what sense it can be said, that an “infinite point,” &c, wherein is no succession, can “comprehend all times,” though time be successive. These phrases I find not in the Scripture. I wonder therefore what was the design of the Schoolmen to bring them up; unless they thought a man could not be a true Christian, unless his understanding be first strangled with such hard sayings. And thus much in answer to his discourse; wherein I think not only his squadrons, but also his reserves of distinctions are defeated. And now your Lordship shall have my doctrine concerning the same question, with my reasons for it, positively and briefly as I can, without any terms of art, in plain English.