Fourthly, That this eternal Being must therefore be the great Author of Nature, The Ancient of Days, who, being at an infinite Distance in his Perfections from all finite and created Beings, exists in a quite different Manner from them, and in a Manner of which they can have no Idea.

I know that several of the School-men, who would not be thought ignorant of any thing, have pretended to explain the Manner of God’s Existence, by telling us, That he comprehends infinite Duration in every Moment; That Eternity is with him a Punctum stans, a fixed Point; or, which is as good Sense, an Infinite Instance; That nothing with Reference to his Existence is either past or to come:  To which the ingenious Mr. Cowley alludes in his Description of Heaven,

  ’Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
  But an Eternal NOW does always last.’

For my own Part, I look upon these Propositions as Words that have no Ideas annexed to them; and think Men had better own their Ignorance than advance Doctrines by which they mean nothing, and which indeed are self-contradictory.  We cannot be too modest in our Disquisitions, when we meditate on Him who is environed with so much Glory and Perfection, who is the Source of Being, the Fountain of all that Existence which we and his whole Creation derive from him.  Let us therefore with the utmost Humility acknowledge, that as some Being must necessarily have existed from Eternity, so this Being does exist after an incomprehensible manner, since it is impossible for a Being to have existed from Eternity after our Manner or Notions of Existence.  Revelation confirms these natural Dictates of Reason in the Accounts which it gives us of the Divine Existence, where it tells us, that he is the same Yesterday, To-day, and for Ever; that he is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the Ending; that a thousand Years are with him as one Day, and one Day as a Thousand Years; by which and the like Expressions, we are taught, that his Existence, with Relation to Time or Duration, is infinitely different from the Existence of any of his Creatures, and consequently that it is impossible for us to frame any adequate Conceptions of it.

In the first Revelation which he makes of his own Being, he entitles himself, I am that I am; and when Moses desires to know what Name he shall give him in his Embassy to Pharaoh, he bids him say that I am hath sent you.  Our great Creator, by this Revelation of himself, does in a manner exclude every thing else from a real Existence, and distinguishes himself from his Creatures, as the only Being which truly and really exists.  The ancient Platonick Notion, which was drawn from Speculations of Eternity, wonderfully agrees with this Revelation which God has made of himself.  There is nothing, say they, which in Reality exists, whose Existence, as we call it, is pieced up of past, present, and to come.  Such a flitting and successive Existence is rather a Shadow of Existence, and something which is like it, than Existence it self.  He only properly exists whose Existence is intirely present; that is, in other Words, who exists in the most perfect Manner, and in such a Manner as we have no Idea of.