creation of man on the score of its recent date._
As to those who are always asking why man was not created during
these countless ages of the infinitely extended past, and came into
being so lately that, according to Scripture, less than 6000 years
have elapsed since he began to be, I would reply to them regarding
the creation of man, just as I replied regarding the origin of the
world to those who will not believe that it is not eternal, but had a
beginning, which even Plato himself most plainly declares, though some
think his statement was not consistent with his real opinion.[537] If
it offends them that the time that has elapsed since the creation of
man is so short, and his years so few according to our authorities,
let them take this into consideration, that nothing that has a limit
is long, and that all the ages of time being finite, are very little,
or indeed nothing at all, when compared to the interminable eternity.
Consequently, if there had elapsed since the creation of man, I do not
say five or six, but even sixty or six hundred thousand years, or sixty
times as many, or six hundred or six hundred thousand times as many, or
this sum multiplied until it could no longer be expressed in numbers,
the same question could still be put, Why was he not made before?
For the past and boundless eternity during which God abstained from
creating man is so great, that, compare it with what vast and untold
number of ages you please, so long as there is a definite conclusion of
this term of time, it is not even as if you compared the minutest drop
of water with the ocean that everywhere flows around the globe. For
of these two, one indeed is very small, the other incomparably vast,
yet both are finite; but that space of time which starts from some
beginning, and is limited by some termination, be it of what extent it
may, if you compare it with that which has no beginning, I know not
whether to say we should count it the very minutest thing, or nothing
at all. For, take this limited time, and deduct from the end of it,
one by one, the briefest moments (as you might take day by day from a
man's life, beginning at the day in which he now lives, back to that
of his birth), and though the number of moments you must subtract in
this backward movement be so great that no word can express it, yet
this subtraction will some time carry you to the beginning. But if
you take away from a time which has no beginning, I do not say brief
moments one by one, nor yet hours, or days, or months, or years even in
quantities, but terms of years so vast that they cannot be named by the
most skilful arithmetician,--take away terms of years as vast as that
which we have supposed to be gradually consumed by the deduction of
moments,--and take them away not once and again repeatedly, but always,
and what do you effect, what do you make by your deduction, since you
never reach the beginning which has no existence? Wherefore, that
which we now demand after five thousand odd years, our descendants
might with like curiosity demand after six hundred thousand years,
supposing these dying generations of men continue so long to decay and
be renewed, and supposing posterity continues as weak and ignorant as
ourselves. The same question might have been asked by those who have
lived before us, and while man was even newer upon earth. The first
man himself, in short, might, the day after, or the very day of his
creation, have asked why he was created no sooner. And no matter at
what earlier or later period he had been created, this controversy
about the commencement of this world's history would have had precisely
the same difficulties as it has now.