of Gods and Goddesses
and pray that our words may be acceptable to them and consistent with
themselves. Let this, then, be our invocation of the Gods, to which I
add an exhortation of myself to speak in such manner as will be most
intelligible to you, and will most accord with my own intent.

First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What
is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is
always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence
and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by
opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a
process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything
that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause,
for without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator,
whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature
of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair
and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created
pattern, it is not fair or perfect. Was the heaven then or the world,
whether called by this or by any other more appropriate name--assuming
the name, I am asking a question which has to be asked at the beginning
of an enquiry about anything--was the world, I say, always in existence
and without beginning? or created, and had it a beginning? Created,
I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore
sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense
and are in a process of creation and created. Now that which is created
must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause. But the father
and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found
him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible. And there is still a
question to be asked about him: Which of the patterns had the artificer
in view when he made the world--the pattern of the unchangeable, or of
that which is created? If the world be indeed fair and the artificer
good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal;
but if what cannot be said without blasphemy is true, then to the
created pattern. Every one will see that he must have looked to the
eternal; for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of
causes. And having been created in this way, the world has been framed
in the likeness of that which is apprehended by