of it as eternal, spiritual,[1] and visible, it would also have been formed such. But if it was formed such as it really is, then He made it such who had mentally conceived of it as such; or He willed it to exist in the ideality[2] of the Father, according to the conception of His mind, such as it now is, compound, mutable, and transient. Since, then, it is just such as the Father had [ideally] formed in counsel with Himself, it must be worthy of the Father. But to affirm that what was mentally conceived and pre-created by the Father of all, just as it has been actually formed, is the fruit of defect, and the production of ignorance, is to be guilty of great blasphemy. For, according to them, the Father of all will thus be [regarded as] generating in His breast, according to His own mental conception, the emanations of defect and the fruits of ignorance, since the things which He had conceived in His mind have actually been produced.
Chap. iv.—The absurdity of the supposed vacuum and defect of the heretics is demonstrated.
1. The cause, then, of such a dispensation on the part of God, is to be inquired after; but the formation of the world is not to be ascribed to any other. And all things are to be spoken of as having been so prepared by God beforehand, that they should be made as they have been made; but shadow and vacuity are not to be conjured into existence. But whence, let me ask, came this vacuity [of which they speak]? If it was indeed produced by Him who,
- ↑ We have translated the text as it here stands in the mss. Grabe omits spiritalem et; Massuet proposes to read et invisibilem, and Stieren invisibilem.
- ↑ In præsentia: Grabe proposes in præscientia, but without ms. authority. "The reader," says Harvey, "will observe that there are three suppositions advanced by the author: that the world, as some heretics asserted, was eternal; that it was created in time, with no previous idea of it in the divine mind; or that it existed as a portion of the divine counsels from all eternity, though with no temporal subsistence until the time of its creation,—and of this the author now speaks." The whole passage is most obscurely expressed.
