“There is one Almighty God who created all things by His Word and fashioned them, and caused that out of what was not all things should be: as saith the Scripture, By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the Breath of His mouth: and again, All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. There is no exception: the Father made _all_ things by Him, whether visible or invisible, objects of sense or objects of intelligence, things temporal or things eternal. He made them not by angels or by any powers separated from His Thought: for God needs none of all these beings: but it is by His Word and His Spirit that He makes and disposes and governs and presides over all things. This God who made the world, this God who fashioned man, this God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, above whom there is no other God, nor Beginning nor Power nor Fulness: this God, as we shall show, is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The same view is expressed with equal prominence and emphasis by a disciple of Irenæus, who shows an even stronger impress of the philosophical speculations of his time:[372] “The one God, the first and sole and universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coeval with him, not infinite chaos, not measureless water, or solid earth, or dense air, or warm fire, or subtle breath, nor the azure cope of the vast heaven: but He was one, alone by Himself, and by His will He made the things that are, that before were not, except so far as they existed in His foreknowledge.... This supreme and only God begets Reason first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word, but as an internal mental process of the universe. Him alone did He beget from existing things: for the Father himself constituted existence, and from it came that which was begotten. The cause of the things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the active will of Him who begat him, and not being without knowledge of the Father’s thought ... so that when the Father bade the world come into being, the Reason brought each thing to perfection one by one, thus pleasing God.”