definite act, and then governing it by definite acts, inevitably involves Him in the idea of time. His acts, words, and even thoughts are represented to us as intervening at definite successive moments in the stream of times; as constituting successive links in the chain of events. They have a past, a present, a future. The Qur'an from end to end holds God in the category of time, in His relation to this world. We hear Him telling Muhammad what He did in the past, what He is doing in the present, what He will do in the future. Now words are the index of thought, and so these words of God denoting tense carry us to the corresponding thought in the Divine mind. The Divine mind is represented as thinking in tenses. Now when thought is involved in a certain category, the thinker himself is thoroughly involved. If, therefore, time and contingency really imply each other, then God in relating Himself to a temporal system has already involved Himself, in some way, in contingency!

We are perfectly willing to admit that this train of thought only conducts us to half the truth, and that the other half, could we only grasp it, would show us God transcending the category of time. But neither Muslim mind nor Christian mind can rise to this; and, therefore, what we object to is that the Muslim should urge a difficulty as a special one against the Incarnation of the Word of God, when it is really a common difficulty. We may say that, from this point of view, the special incarnation in Christ in no way differs from the

general immanence involved in the guardianship of the world. A Muslim may try to save himself by saying that events do indeed happen in time, including the manifestations of God's words and acts, but that this does not touch God Himself or His thoughts because these things were all written down beforehand in the Preserved Tablet, and, therefore, existed all together in the thought of God, without present, past or future; we reply that this is of no avail, for the Muslim is none the less bound to admit a distinction between the ideal existence of the world in the mind of God and its real existence in time. There must be an essential difference, or else the world were as eternal as God.. Well then, if there is a difference, it remains true that God, after bringing the world from the sphere of thought into the sphere of being, involved Himself in some new way with the category of time, with the consequences before mentioned. Or if, going still deeper in philosophy, the Muslim contends that the self is one thing and the attributes another, that God's self is utterly transcendent of time, while His attributes may be 'attached to' ¹ created things in time, without infringing upon His transcendence, we reply that this philosophy may possibly be sound, but it applies to all mind as such. Philosophers have pointed out that even in man there must be an extra-temporal element; for otherwise, if not only the acts and thoughts of men were in the flux and stream of