Secondly, let us look at the strength of their argument.  And it were best to wrestle with them at first at close quarters.  You yourself, who so recklessly assert whatever takes your fancy; were you begotten voluntarily or involuntarily by your father?  If involuntarily, then he was under some tyrant’s sway (O terrible violence!) and who was the tyrant?  You will hardly say it was nature,—for nature is tolerant of chastity.  If it was voluntarily, then by a few syllables your father is done away with, for you are shewn to be the son of Will, and not of your father.  But I pass to the relation between God and the creature, and I put your own question to your own wisdom.  Did God create all things voluntarily or under compulsion?  If under compulsion, here also is the tyranny, and one who played the tyrant; if voluntarily, the creatures also are deprived of their God, and you before the rest, who invent such arguments and tricks of logic.  For a partition is set up between the Creator and the creatures in the shape of Will.  And yet I think that the Person who wills is distinct from the Act of willing; He who begets from the Act of begetting; the Speaker from the speech, or else we are all very stupid.  On the one side we have the mover, and on the other that which is, so to speak, the motion.  Thus the thing willed is not the child of will, for it does not always result therefrom; nor is that which is begotten the child of generation, nor that which is heard the child of speech, but of the Person who willed, or begat, or spoke.  But the things of God are beyond all this, for with Him perhaps the Will to beget is generation, and there is no intermediate action (if we may accept this altogether, and not rather consider generation superior to will).