most suitable and useful to many who bathe their bodies in it and to fish it is useful and wholesome in both ways.  Bread nourishes man, but kills hawks.  And does not mud itself, which is offensive and noxious when swallowed or smelt, serve as cooling to the touch in hot weather, and as a cure for wounds from fire?  What can be nastier than dung, or more worthless than ashes?  And yet they are of such use to the fields, that the Romans thought divine honors due to the discoverer, Stercutio, from whose name the word for dung [stercus] is derived. 13.  But why enumerate details which are countless?  We need not go farther than the four elements themselves, which, as every one knows, are beneficial when there is agreement, and bitterly opposed to nature when there is disagreement in the objects acted upon.  We who live in air die under earth or under water, while innumerable animals creep alive in sand or loose earth, and fish die in our air.  Fire consumes our bodies, but, when suitably applied, it both restores from cold, and expels diseases without number.  The sun to which you bow the knee, and than which, indeed, there is no fairer object among visible things, strengthens the eyes of eagles, but hurts and dims our eyes when we gaze on it; and yet we too can accustom ourselves to look upon it without injury.  Will you, then, allow the sun to be compared to the poison which the Athenian woman made harmless by habituating herself to it?  Reflect for once, and consider that if a substance is an evil because it hurts some one, the light which you worship cannot be acquitted of this charge.  See the preferableness of making evil in general to consist in this disagreement, from which the sun’s ray produces dimness in the eyes, though nothing is pleasanter to the eyes than light.167 167 [The reasoning here is admirably adapted to Augustin’s purpose, which is to refute the Manichæan notion of the evil nature of material substance.—A.H.N.] 123 Evil is Not a Substance, But a Disagreement Hostile to Substance.