Their opinion, which is extant, matters little. The holy fathers who have investigated this occurrence are divided in their views. It must be remembered that Plutarch relates another truly wonderful fact universal in its range, as being notoriously simultaneous with the singular local adventure above described--the sudden silence of Delphi, and all the other famous pagan oracles, from the 8th day before the Kalends of April, in the 202d Olympiad, at six P.M. At that hour, on that day (March 25, Friday, Anno Domini 33), those oracles were stricken dumb, and nevermore returned answers to their votaries. Coupling these phenomena together, in presence of a thousand other portents, the holy fathers think, one party of them, that the enemy of man and of God, and that enemy's legions, were grieving and wailing, at the hour which Plutarch specifies (the time of evening, and on the very day, when our Lord died), at the redemption just then consummated; others, that the Almighty permitted nature "to sigh through all her works," in sympathy with the voluntary sufferings of her expiring Lord. "Now, hearken," proceeded Dion in his letter, "to how I was occupied, hundreds of miles away, in Heliopolis, at the time, the very hour of the very day, when so wild and weird a response came from the powers of the air and the recesses of the deep to those who shouted forth, amid a calm on the silent breast of the Ægean Sea, that the great Pan ('the great All,' 'the universal Lord,' as you, my friends, are aware it means in Greek) had died! "I had gone out, shortly before the sixth hour on this sixth day, to take a stroll in the tree-shaded suburbs of Heliopolis, with my friend Apollophanes. Suddenly, the sun, in a horrible manner, withdrew its light so effectually that we saw the stars. It was the time of the Hebrew Pasch, and the season of the month when the moon is at the full, and the period of an eclipse, or of the moon's apparent conjunction with the sun, was well known not to be then; independently of which, two unexampled and unnatural portents, contrary to the laws of the heavenly bodies, occurred: first, the moon entered the sun's disc _from the east_; secondly, when she had covered the disc and touched the opposite diameter, instead of passing onward, _she receded_, and resumed her former position in the sky. All the astronomers will tell you that these two facts, and also the time of the eclipse itself, are equally in positive deviation from the otherwise everlasting laws of the sidereal or planetary movements. I felt that either this universal frame was perishing or the Lord and Pilot of nature was himself suffering; and I turned to Apollophanes, and, 'O light of philosophy, glass of science!' I said, 'explain to me what this means.'