of perfection—being ever-living, speaking whenever He wills, and acting: actions that inhere in Him or originated works brought forth one after another. This is all that the proof establishes; and from the perpetuity of the genus it does not follow that every one of its individual instances, or even any particular one, must be perpetual. You say exactly this with respect to the motions of the heavens and the occurrences on earth: the genus of events, you maintain, is everlasting and without beginning, yet no single event among them is eternal; they are all originated, even though events as a kind have never ceased. Were you to speak in the same way about the act of the Necessary Being, you would have fulfilled what this proof requires and would have contradicted no evidence of reason or revelation.

Second, we may say: If His efficacy with regard to some specific entity were among the necessities of His Essence to the exclusion of other existents, then His efficacy toward anything else would not be essential to Him. Consequently, certain acts of influencing would not be necessary from all eternity; some acts of influence would be originated, not eternal. If that could occur without successive states inhering in His Essence, the same could be said of the entire universe, and nothing in it would be eternal. But if successive states must inhere in Him, it would still be possible on that account for everything issuing from Him to be originated after not having been, so that nothing in the universe would be eternal.

Third, for the Agent to be the agent of a thing that is co-eternal with Him is to unite two mutually exclusive opposites, as the theologians have pointed out. Making His Essence and its necessary attributes the reason that He is an agent does not oblige Him to act upon one specific thing—just as it does not oblige Him to act upon every thing. And if what is meant is His efficacy with respect to every single thing, then it must be said that it is impossible for