As far as we can reach, He Who Is, and God, are the special names of His Essence; and of these especially He Who Is, not only because when He spoke to Moses in the mount, and Moses asked what His Name was, this was what He called Himself, bidding him say to the people 'I Am has sent me' (Ex. 3:14), but also because we find that this Name is the more strictly appropriate.

If time came before me, time is not before the Word, whose Begetter is atemporal. When the beginningless Father was there, leaving nothing superior to His divinity, then also was there the Father's Son, having in the Father a timeless beginning, like the sun's great circle of overwhelming clear light.

Let us not esteem worldly prosperity or adversity as things real or of any moment, but let us live elsewhere, and raise all our attention to Heaven; esteeming sin as the only true evil, and nothing truly good, but virtue which unites us to God.

Our starting-point must be the fact that God cannot be named... no mind has yet contained or language embraced God's substance in its fullness. No, we use facts connected with Him to outline qualities that correspond with Him, collecting a faint and feeble mental image from various quarters. Our noblest theologian is not one who has discovered the whole - our earthly shackles do not permit us the whole - but one whose mental image is by comparison fuller, who has gathered in his mind a richer picture, outline, or whatever we call it, of the truth.

There is One God and One Mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ (cf. I Tim. 2:5). For He still pleads even now as man for my salvation; for He continues to wear the Body which He assumed, until He make me a god by the power of His Incarnation; although He is no longer known after the flesh (cf. II Cor. 5:16) ? I mean, the passions of the flesh, the same, except sin, as ours.

We were made for good works (cf. Phil. 1:11) to the glory and praise of our Maker, and to imitate God as far as might be.

Different men have different names, which they owe to their parents or to themselves, that is, to their own pursuits and achievements. But our great pursuit, the great name we wanted, was to be Christians, to be called Christians.