gloom. It is a pathetic picture, but it does not go beyond the realities
of the case. For, with all our light on other matters, with all our
freedom of action, with all our frequent forgetfulness of the fact that
we are thus encompassed, it remains true that, apart from the
emancipation and illumination that are effected by Jesus Christ, this is
the picture of mankind as they are. And you are beneath that veil, and
swathed, obstructively as regards light and liberty, by its heavy folds,
unless Christ has freed you.

But we must go a step further than that, I think; and although one does
not wish to force too much meaning on to a poetic metaphor, still I
cannot help supposing that that universal pall, as I called it, which is
cast over all nations, has a very definite and a very tragic meaning.
There is a universal fact of human experience which answers to the
figure, and that is sin. That is the black thing whose ebon folds hamper
us, and darken us, and shut out the visions of God and blessedness, and
all the glorious blue above us. The heavy, dark mist settles down on the
plains, though the sky above is undimmed by it, and the sun is blazing
in the zenith. Not one beam can penetrate through the wet, chill
obstruction, and men stumble about in the fog with lamps and torches,
and all the while a hundred feet up it is brightness and day. Or, if at
some points the obstruction is thinned and the sun does come through, it
is shorn of all its gracious beams and power to warm and cheer, and
looks but like a copper-coloured, livid, angry ball. So the 'veil that
is spread over all nations, 'that awful fact of universal sinfulness,
shuts out God--who is our light and our joy--from us, and no other
lights or joys are more than twinkling tapers in the mist. Or it makes
us see Him as men in a fog see the sun--shorn of His graciousness,
threatening, wrathful, unlovely.