For man was made to live in closest touch with God. That is his native
air. Out of that air his lungs are badly affected. This other air is too
heavy. It's malarial, and full of gases and germy dust. In it he chokes
and gasps. Yet he knows not why. He gropes about in the night made by his
own shut eyes. He doesn't seem to know enough to open them. And sometimes
he _will_ not open them. For the hinge of the eyelid is in the will. And
having shut the light out, he gets tangled up in his ideas as to what _is_
light. He puts darkness for light, and light for darkness.

Once man knew God well; close up. And that means _loved_, gladly, freely.
For here to know is to love. But one day a bad choice was made. And the
choice made an ugly kink in his will. The whole trouble began there. A man
sees through his will. That is his medium for the transmission of light.
If it be twisted, his seeing, his understanding, is twisted. The twist in
the will regulates the twist in the eye. Both ways, too, for a good change
in the will in turn changes the eyes back to seeing straight. He that is
willing to do the right shall clearly see the light.

But that first kink seems to have been getting worse kinked ever since.
And so man does not see God as He is. Man is cross-eyed Godward, but
doesn't know it. Man is color-blind toward God. The blue of God's truth is
to him an arousing, angering red. The soft, soothing green of His love
becomes a noisy, irritating yellow. Nobody has been so much misunderstood
as God. He has suffered misrepresentation from two quarters: His enemies
and His friends. More from--which? Hard to tell. Jesus is God trying to
tell men plainly what He is really like.

The world turned down the wrong lane, and has been going that way
pell-mell ever since. Yet so close is the wrong lane to the right that a