VII.  God always was, The whole of this passage occurs again verbatim in the second Oration for Easter Day, cc. iii.–ix. and always is, and always will be.  Or rather, God always Is.  For Was and Will be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature, but He is Eternal Being.  And this is the Name that He gives to Himself when giving the Oracle to Moses in the Mount.  For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only adumbrated by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily…not by His Essentials, but by His Environment; one image being got from one source and another from another, and combined into some sort of presentation of the truth, which escapes us before we have caught it, and takes to flight before we have conceived it, blazing forth upon our Master-part, even when that is cleansed, as the lightning flash which will not stay its course, does upon our sight…in order as I conceive by that part of it which we can comprehend to draw us to itself (for that which is altogether incomprehensible is outside the bounds of hope, and not within the compass of endeavour), and by that part of It which we cannot comprehend to move our wonder, and as an object of wonder to become more an object of desire, and being desired to purify, and by purifying to make us like God; John x. 15. so that when we have thus become like Himself, God may, to use a bold expression, hold converse with us as Gods, being united to us, and that perhaps to the same extent as He already knows those who are known to Him.  The Divine Nature then is boundless and hard to understand; and all that we can comprehend of Him is His boundlessness; even though one may conceive that because He is of a simple nature He is therefore either wholly incomprehensible, or perfectly comprehensible.  For let us further enquire what is implied by “is of a simple nature.”  For it is quite certain that this simplicity is not itself its nature, just as composition is not by itself the essence of compound beings.