Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Ames draws a hard line that modern ears may mistake for abstraction but was, in his world, a live political and spiritual boundary. “Nothing exists from eternity but God” is not just metaphysics; it’s an anti-rivalry claim. If only God is eternal, then every created thing, including kings, churches, and consciences, is radically contingent. That contingency does two jobs at once: it humbles human authority and it quarantines the sacred from being smuggled into nature, objects, or institutions.

The second clause is the real pressure point. By insisting God is “not the matter or a part of any creature,” Ames is fencing off Christianity from the seductive slide into pantheism, animism, or any theology that makes the world itself divine. In early modern Protestantism, that line also had practical stakes: if God is not embedded in “matter,” then you can’t locate him safely in relics, altars, images, or sacramental mechanics. The quote is, quietly, an argument against religious materialism and the kinds of spiritual shortcuts it enables.

“Only the maker” sounds reductive until you hear the Puritan accent: makerhood is sovereignty. God isn’t one component in the universe’s inventory; he’s the author of the inventory. Ames, writing amid Reformation aftershocks and fierce doctrinal policing, is protecting transcendence as a moral technology. If God is outside the system, he can judge it. If he’s part of it, he’s just another force to be managed.