For after mentioning the creation, he naturally speaks of the Maker's Power as seen in it; and that Power, I say, is the Word of God, through whom all things have been made. If indeed the creation is sufficient by itself alone, without the Son, to make God known, be careful not to fall into thinking that it has come into being without the Son. But if it has come into being through the Son, and 'in Him all things hold together,' it must follow that whoever contemplates the creation rightly is also contemplating the Word who made it, and through Him begins to grasp the Father. And if, as the Savior also says, 'No one knows the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son reveals Him,' and if, when Philip asked, 'Show us the Father,' He did not say, 'Look at the creation,' but, 'Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father,' then Paul has good reason — while accusing the Greeks of contemplating the harmony and order of creation without reflecting on the Word who made it and is within it (for the creatures bear witness to their own Maker), so as to grasp the true God through creation and abandon their worship of it — Paul has good reason, I say, to speak of 'His Eternal Power and Godhead,' meaning the Son by it. And where the sacred writers say,⁠a 'Who exists before the ages,' and 'Through whom He made the ages,' they proclaim just as clearly the eternal and everlasting being of the Son, even while they are speaking of God Himself. So, if Isaiah says, 'The Everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth'; and Susanna said, 'O Everlasting God'; and Baruch wrote, 'I will cry to the Everlasting in my days,' and shortly after, 'My hope is in the Everlasting, that He will save you, and joy has come to me from the Holy One';⁠b still, since the Apostle, writing to the Hebrews, says, 'Who, being the radiance of His glory and the Expression of His Person'; and David too in the eighty-ninth Psalm, 'And let the brightness of the Lord be upon us,' and, 'In Your Light we shall see Light' — who has so little sense as to doubt the eternity of the Son? For when did anyone 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, 'Your kingdom is a kingdom of all ages,' forbid anyone to imagine any interval at all in which the Word did not exist. For if every interval in the ages is measured, and the Word is King and Maker of all the ages, then, since no interval at all exists before Him, it would be madness to say, 'There was once when the Everlasting was not,' and 'The Son is from nothing.' And since the Lord Himself says, 'I am the Truth,' not 'I became the Truth,' but always 'I am — I am the Shepherd — I am the Light,' and again, 'Do you not call Me Lord and Master? And you say well, for so I am' — who, hearing such language from God, the Wisdom and Word of the Father, speaking of Himself, will still hesitate about the truth, and not at once believe that the phrase 'I am' means that the Son is eternal and without beginning?