"Have they the courage to know? The shell of wisdom is enough for them; the kernel, for almost everybody, is deadly." "Well, let me die, Master! Give the core to me!" "Have you courage?" "Yes; but speak--speak!" "And what can I tell you? I do not know, ... and need I tell you? Listen to the calmness of the evening, and the secret will be yours without words of mine...." He kept stroking Julian's head; the boy was dreaming, "This, this is what I waited for," and clasping the knees of Iamblicus he falteringly entreated-- "Master, have pity!... Reveal it all!... Do not desert me!" With green and strangely motionless eyes kept steadily on the clouds, Iamblicus murmured, as if speaking to himself: "Yes, we have all forgotten the voice of God. Like children estranged from the cradle from the face of their father, we hear Him, and we do not recognise Him. To hear His voice, every earthly cry in our souls must cease. Just so long as reason shines and illumines our souls, we remain imprisoned in ourselves and see not God. But when reason is put by, ecstacy falls upon us like the dew of night--that ecstacy which the evil cannot know. The wise, the good alone can become, of their own will, lyres vibrating under the hand of God. Whence comes that beam which falls into the soul? I do not know. It comes unawares, and when one least expects it. To search for it is useless. God is not remote from us. One must make ready, with a soul becalmed; and simply wait, as the eyes await (according to the saying of the poet) _the rush of the sun from dark ocean_. God does not come, God does not go away; He is revealed. He is, what the universe is not, the negation of everything that exists. He is nothing, and He is All." Iamblicus rose and slowly extended his wasted arms: "Be still, be still, I tell you! Let all things listen for Him! He is here! Let the earth and the sea, let even the sky be dumb! Listen!... It is He who fills the universe, the very atoms sing with His breath; He who illumines matter and chaos--_at which the gods tremble_--just as the setting sun illumines that dark cloud." Julian listened. It seemed to him that the master's calm weak voice was filling the world, was reaching the heights of the heaven, and the last confines of the sea. But the boy's sadness was so deep that it escaped from his bosom in an involuntary sigh. "Father, forgive me if the question is a folly; but if it is thus with the world why go on living? Why this eternal interchange of life and death? Why pain? Why evil? Why the burden of the body? Why doubt? Why this dark thirst for the impossible?" Iamblicus looked at him with gentleness, and anew passed his hand over Julian's head. He answered: