means aimlessness. The mind is still keen, even brilliant, but the guiding
star is shut out, and that keen mind goes whirring aimlessly around.
Sometimes a very earnest aimlessness. The man's on a foggy sea without sun
or star. The compass on board is useless.

But more pitiable and pathetic yet; indeed utterly laughable if it were
not so terribly serious and pathetic:--this man in the dark proceeds
gravely to decide that this darkness of his own making is a superior sort
of light, and bows low in worship of its maker. He has even been known to
write brilliant essays on the light-giving power of blinding darkness,
with earnest protests at the evil of this thing commonly called light.
Sometimes having carefully cottoned up the shutters that no scrap of sun
light or sun warmth may get in, he strikes a friction match, and sits
warming himself, and eloquently sets forth his own greatness as shown by
the match, _friction_ match. Most of this sort of light and heat is of the
friction sort.

Then with reluctant hand, one who knows Paul's tender heart can well
believe, the curtain is drawn aside for the last two stages; the grosser,
gutter, animal stages, which, not always by any means, but all too
commonly follow. "Past feeling!" The delicate sense of feeling about right
and purity dulls and goes. The fine inner judgment blunts and leaves. The
shrinking sensitiveness toward the dishonorable and impure loses its edge
and departs. _Then_--pell mell, like a pack of dogs down a steep hill,
follows the last--"lasciviousness," the purest, holiest things in the
gutter-slime, and then, cold-blooded, greedy trading in these things.
That's the picture painted in shadows of Rembrandt blackness, newly
blackened, of the effect in man himself of turning away from God.

Now Jesus is the music of God's heart sounding in man's ears anew, that he