4. But these men are generally, as the most part of Plato’s readers, timorous and vainly perplexed, using all their endeavors by wresting and tormenting his sense to conceal and hide what he has written, as if it were some terrible novelty not fit for public view, that the world and the soul neither had their beginning and composition from eternity, nor had their essence from a boundless immensity of time,—of which we have particularly spoken already. So that now it shall suffice to say no more than this, that these writers confound and smother (if they do not rather utterly abolish) his eager contest and dispute in behalf of the Gods, wherein Plato confesses himself to have been transported with an ambitious zeal, even beyond the strength of his years, against the atheists of his time. For if the world had no beginning, Plato’s opinion vanishes,—that the soul, much elder than the body, is the principle of all motion and alteration, or (to use his own words) their chieftain and first efficient cause, whose mansion is in Nature’s secret retirements. But what the soul is what the body, and why the soul is said to have been elder than the body, shall be made appear in the progress of this discourse. The ignorance of this seems to have been the occasion of much doubt and incredulity in reference to the true opinion. 5. First therefore, I shall propose my own sentiments concerning these things, desiring to gain credit no otherwise than by the most probable strength of arguments, explaining and reconciling to the utmost of my ability truth and paradox together; after which I shall apply both the explication and demonstration to the words of the text. In my opinion then the business lies thus. The world, saith Heraclitus, neither did any one of all the Gods nor any mortal man create,—as if he had been afraid that, not being able to make out the creation by a Deity, we should be constrained to acknowledge some man to have been the architect of the universe. But certainly far better it is, in submission to Plato’s judgment, to avow, both in discourse and in our songs of praise, that the glory of the structure belongs to God,—for the frame itself is the most beautiful of all masterpieces, and God the most illustrious of all causes,—but that the substance and materials were not created, but always ready at the ordering and disposal of the Omnipotent Builder, to give it form and figure, as near as might be, approaching to his own resemblance. For the creation was not out of nothing, but out of matter wanting beauty and perfection, like the rude materials of a house, a garment, or a statue, lying first in shapeless confusion. For before the creation of the world there was nothing but a confused heap; yet was that confused heap neither without a body, without motion, nor without a soul. The corporeal part was without form or consistence, and the moving part stupid and headlong; and this was the disorder of a soul not guided by reason.