The voice of the world, he thought, went up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?
The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women, of these dogs and horses who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read.

There were places where it did not shine: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of life lay there he dared not think of.

God knows how the man groped for the light,--for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.
There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer than the sunshine, and purer.

It fell on the dense crowds,--upon the just and the unjust.

It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from which the coarser light was barred, into the deepest mires of body where a soul could wallow, and made them clear.