14.  Let us first ask them this question:  In what sense do they say that the Son is “after the Father;” later in time, or in order, or in dignity?  But in time no one is so devoid of sense as to assert that the Maker of the ages ποιητὴς τῶν αἰ& 240·νων. holds a second place, when no interval intervenes in the natural conjunction of the Father with the Son. Yet the great watchword of the Arians was ἦν ποτε ὅτε οὐκ ἦν.  And indeed so far as our conception of human relations goes, τῆ ἐννοί& 139· τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων is here the reading of five MSS.  The Benedictines prefer τῶν ἀνθρώπων, with the sense of “in human thought.” it is impossible to think of the Son as being later than the Father, not only from the fact that Father and Son are mutually conceived of in accordance with the relationship subsisting between them, but because posteriority in time is predicated of subjects separated by a less interval from the present, and priority of subjects farther off.  For instance, what happened in Noah’s time is prior to what happened to the men of Sodom, inasmuch as Noah is more remote from our own day; and, again, the events of the history of the men of Sodom are posterior, because they seem in a sense to approach nearer to our own day.  But, in addition to its being a breach of true religion, is it not really the extremest folly to measure the existence of the life which transcends all time and all the ages by its distance from the present?  Is it not as though God the Father could be compared with, and be made superior to, God the Son, who exists before the ages, precisely in the same way in which things liable to beginning and corruption are described as prior to one another?