to which neither any part to come is absent,
nor of that which is past hath escaped, is worthy to be accounted
everlasting, and this is necessary, that being no possession in itself,
it may always be present to itself, and have an infinity of movable time
present to it. Wherefore they are deceived who, hearing that Plato
thought that this world had neither beginning of time nor should ever
have any end, think that by this means the created world should be
coeternal with the Creator. For it is one thing to be carried through an
endless life, which Plato attributed to the world, another thing to
embrace the whole presence of an endless life together, which is
manifestly proper to the divine mind. Neither ought God to seem more
ancient than the things created, by the quantity of time, but rather by
the simplicity of His divine nature. For that infinite motion of
temporal things imitateth the present state of the unmovable life, and
since it cannot express nor equal it, it falleth from immobility to
motion, and from the simplicity of presence, it decreaseth to an
infinite quantity of future and past, and since it cannot possess
together all the fulness of its life, by never leaving to be in some
sort, it seemeth to emulate in part that which it cannot fully obtain
and express, tying itself to this small presence of this short and swift
moment, which because it carrieth a certain image of that abiding
presence, whosoever hath it, seemeth to be. But because it could not
stay it undertook an infinite journey of time, and so it came to pass
that it continued that life by going whose plenitude it could not
comprehend by staying. Wherefore, if we will give things their right
names, following Plato, let us say that God is everlasting and the world
perpetual. Wherefore, since every judgment comprehendeth those things
which are subject unto it, according to its own nature, and God hath
always an everlasting and present state, His knowledge also surpassing
all motions of time, remaineth in the simplicity of His presence, and
comprehending the infinite spaces of that which is past and to come,
considereth all things in His simple knowledge as though they were now
in doing. So that, if thou wilt weigh His foreknowledge with which He
discerneth all things, thou wilt more rightly esteem it to be the
knowledge of a never fading instant than a foreknowledge as of a thing