by all rational people, and this demonstrates that every contingent being and every temporal event has an Originator who exists in and of Himself, wholly outside the realm of contingents. This, however, is different from the perpetual succession of events in the past or the future. For if any single event is not itself everlasting, abiding, and continuous, it does not follow that the entire class of events is not everlasting, abiding, and continuous; when one event is added to another, multiplicity arises—something absent from the single event. What is enduring, abiding, extended, protracted, and abundant does not require each of its individual members to be enduring, protracted, and abundant.

This is a reminder of the difference between the two cases. If so, we say: their assertion of the world’s eternity entails an infinite regress of effectors, and that is necessarily—and unanimously—invalid. They themselves concede the impossibility of an infinite regress of effectors, yet some of them try to say that the regress occurs only in the conditions of causality, not in the very cause.

We reply: If this event depends upon a condition of the cause that constitutes its completion, then once the cause is complete the effect must accompany it; it cannot lag behind. Every event must therefore be accompanied by the completion of its cause, and the discussion of the completion of the cause of the event is exactly like the discussion of the event itself. This necessitates an infinite regress of completions of causes, so that the completion of the cause of every effect accompanies that effect. Hence the cause of every event reaches completion only at the moment the event occurs, and that completion, in turn, has its own cause that reaches completion only at the moment it occurs. Thus there results a regress of completions that have no agent. There is no difference between an infinite regress of causes that are themselves effects without an agent and an infinite regress of completions of causes that are themselves effects without an agent. Moreover, these successive completions cannot be