All nations have acknowledged this perfection of the Divine Being. Plato calls him the <<idea tou agathou>>, the idea or essence of goodness. In the three principles of the Platonic Trinity--<<to agathon>> _goodness_, <<nous>> _intelligence_, and <<psychê>> _vitality_.--The first place is assigned to the <<to agathon>> _goodness_, which the Platonists conceive to be like an immense and most pure light, continually diffusing and communicating its invigorating beams. To this the Platonist Boctius alludes, in that celebrated description of God, where he calls him _Fons Boni Lucidus_, the lucid fountain of goodness.--There is an ancient cabalistical table, supposed to be borrowed from the Pythagoreans, which represents, in a visible scheme, the order of the Divine perfections: wherein it is observable that _goodness_ presides over, and gives laws and measures to all the other attributes of God.
Philo says, God is the name of _goodness_; and our English word, adds a late author, seems to be a contraction of the word _good_; or, however, is the same with the German _Got_, or _Godt_, which came, as is thought, from the Arabic word _Gada_, of the same signification. So that the German and the English name of the Supreme Being, in common use, is taken from the attribute of his _goodness_. "The word itself is pure Anglo-saxon," says Dr. Adam Clarke, "and, among our ancestors, signified not only the Divine Being, now commonly designated by the word, but also _good_; as in their apprehension it appears, that _God_ and _Good_ were correlative terms; and when they thought or spoke of him, they were ever led from the word itself to consider him as THE GOOD BEING a fountain of infinite benevolence and beneficence towards his creatures." The word GOD, expressed in the old Saxon, is _bona res_, a good thing.
That God is _good_, is the constant language of Divine revelation; for this attribute is every where celebrated, both in the Old and New Testament. It may be distinguished as _natural_, _moral_, and _communicative_. The first of these is the absolute perfection of his nature, which is goodness itself in its very essence. He is originally good, and that of himself; which is a property peculiar to no other creature, for all the goodness of the creature is derived from God. He is infinitely and therefore incomprehensively good to men and angels; hence his goodness knows no limits. We read of the "riches of his goodness," which are as "unsearchable," as is his "greatness." He is immutably good, for "the goodness of God endureth continually." And as his dependence on no one admits not of his being changed by others, so neither does his immutability admit of it by himself; for if he alter for the better he was not God before, and if for the worse, he then would not be God. Thus he is essentially, originally, infinitely, incomprehensibly, and unchangeably good.