104. From the sun also, is the only answer, I suppose, possible to physical science. It is not a false answer: quite true, like the other, up to a certain point. To-day, in the strength of your youth, you may know what it is to have the power of the sun taken out of your arms and legs. But when you are old, you will know what it is to have the power of the sun taken out of your minds also. Such a thing may happen to you, sometimes, even now; but it will continually happen to you when you are my age. You will no more, then, think over a matter to any good purpose after twelve o'clock in the day. It may be possible to think over, and, much more, to talk over, matters, to little, or to bad, purpose after twelve o'clock in the day. The members of your national legislature do their work, we know, by gaslight; but you don't suppose the power of the sun is in any of _their_ devices? Quite seriously, all the vital functions,--and, like the rest and with the rest, the pure and wholesome faculties of the brain,--rise and set with the sun: your digestion and intellect are alike dependent on its beams; your thoughts, like your blood, flow from the force of it, in all scientific accuracy and necessity. Sol illuminatio nostra est; Sol salus nostra; Sol sapientia nostra. And it is the final act and outcome of lowest national atheism, since it cannot deny the sun, at least to strive to do without it; to blast the day in heaven with smoke, and prolong the dance, and the council, by night, with tapers, until at last, rejoicing--Dixit insipiens in corde suo, non est Sol. 105. Well, the sliding of the serpent, and the device of the serpent, we admit, come from the sun. The flight of the dove, and its harmlessness,--do they also? The flight,--yes, assuredly. The Innocence?--It is a new question. How of that? Between movement and non-movement--nay, between sense and non-sense--the difference rests, we say, in the power of Apollo; but between malice and innocence, where shall we find the root of _that_ distinction? 106. Have you ever considered how much literal truth there is in the words--"The light of the body is the eye. If, therefore, thine eye be evil"--and the rest? How _can_ the eye be evil? How, if evil, can it fill the whole body with darkness? What is the meaning of having one's body _full_ of darkness? It cannot mean merely being blind. Blind, you may fall in a ditch if you move; but you may be well, if at rest. But to be evil-eyed, is not that worse than to have no eyes? and instead of being only in darkness, to have darkness in _us_, portable, perfect, and eternal?