But, as ’tis impossible that the act of creation should be coeval with the first being, what other act of goodness can be? For that being which is essentially good, must ever have been actively and actually so. To answer this great question, we must thus expostulate, as the prophet _Isaiah_ does in the person of God, in his last chapter, when summing up the business of his prophetical office: “Shall I bring to the birth, and not beget, saith _Jehovah_: shall I cause to bring forth, and be myself barren, saith thy God?” He is there speaking of the birth of the son of God in human form; but we may apply it in a more eminent degree, to the son of God in his divine nature; and as the Druids may well be suppos’d to have done. The highest act of goodness which is possible, even for the supreme being, is the production of his like, the act of filiation, the begetting of his son, _Prov._ viii. 22. “The LORD _begat_ me _from eternity_, before his works of old;” (so it ought to be read) _ver._ 30. “then I was by him, as one _brought up_ with him (_amoun_ in the original) and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.” This is the internal divine fecundity of the fruitful cause of all things. Creation is external fecundity. The Druids would naturally apply the term generation, to this act of producing this person, or divine emanation from the supreme, which we are oblig’d to admit of: and to affirm him coeval with the supreme. The difficulty of priority in time, between father and son, would easily be remov’d, by considering the difference between divine and human generation, the production of necessary and contingent beings. If an artist produces an admirable and curious piece of mechanism, he is said to make it; if he produces a person or being altogether like himself, he is rightly said to generate that person; he begets a son, ’tis an act of filiation. So the like we must affirm of the supreme being generating another being, with whom only he could communicate of his goodness from all eternity, and without any beginning; or, in scripture language, _in whom he always had complacency_. This is what _Plato_ means, “by love being ancienter than all the gods; that the kingdom of love is prior to the kingdom of necessity.” And this son must be a self-existent, all-perfect being, equally as the father, self-origination only excepted, which the necessary relation or oeconomy between them forbids. If he is a son, he is like himself; if he is like himself, he is God; if he is God, an eternity of existence is one necessary part of his divine nature and perfection.