12.

P. 313 For after making mention of the creation, he naturally speaks of the Framer’s Power as seen in it, which Power, I say, is the Word of God, by whom all things have been made. If indeed the creation is sufficient of itself alone, without the Son, to make God known, see that you fall not, from thinking that without the Son it has come to be. But if through the Son it has come to be, and ‘in Him all things consist ¹,’ it must follow that he who contemplates the creation rightly, is contemplating also the Word who framed it, and through Him begins to apprehend the Father ². And if, as the Saviour also says, ‘No one knoweth the Father, save the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him ³,’ and if on Philip’s asking, ‘Shew us the Father,’ He said not, ‘Behold the creation,’ but, ‘He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father ⁴,’ reasonably doth Paul,—while accusing the Greeks of contemplating the harmony and order of the creation without reflecting on the Framing Word within it (for the creatures witness to their own Framer) so as through the creation to apprehend the true God, and abandon their worship of it,—reasonably hath he said, ‘His Eternal Power and Godhead ⁵,’ thereby signifying the Son. And where the sacred writers say, ‘Who exists before the ages,’ and ‘By whom He made the ages ⁶,’ they thereby as clearly preach the eternal and everlasting being of the Son, even while they are designating God Himself. Thus, if Isaiah says, ‘The Everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth ⁷;’ and Susanna said, ‘O Everlasting God ⁸;’ and Baruch wrote, ‘I will cry unto the Everlasting in my days,’ and shortly after, ‘My hope is in the Everlasting, that He will save you, and joy is come unto me from the Holy One ⁹;’ yet forasmuch as the Apostle, writing to the Hebrews, says, ‘Who being the radiance of His glory and the Expression of His Person ¹⁰;’ and David too in the eighty-ninth Psalm, ‘And the brightness of the Lord be upon us,’ and, ‘In Thy Light shall we see Light ¹¹,’ who has so little sense as to doubt of the eternity of the Son ¹²? for when did man see light without the brightness of its radiance, that he may say of the Son, ‘There was once, when He was not,’ or ‘Before His generation He was not.’ And the words addressed to the Son in the hundred and forty-fourth Psalm, ‘Thy kingdom is a kingdom of all ages ¹³,’ forbid any one to imagine any interval at all in which the Word did not exist. For if every interval in the ages is measured, and of all the ages the Word is King and Maker, therefore, whereas no interval at all exists prior to Him ¹⁴, it were madness to say, ‘There was once when the Everlasting was not,’ and ‘From nothing is the Son.’ And whereas the Lord Himself says, ‘I am the Truth ¹⁵,’ not ‘I became the Truth;’ but always, ‘I am,—I am the Shepherd,—I am the Light,’—and again, ‘Call ye Me not, Lord and Master? and ye call Me well, for so I am,’ who, hearing such language from God, and the Wisdom, and Word of the Father, speaking of Himself, will any longer hesitate about the truth, and not forthwith believe that in the phrase ‘I am,’ is signified that the Son is eternal and without beginning?