for fear of pitfalls, precipices, wild beasts, and enemies; and so
sighing for the day and compelled to be inactive till it comes. That
is the picture of humanity apart from Jesus Christ, a darkness so
intense, so tragic, that it is, as it were, the very shadow of the
ultimate and essential darkness which is death, and in it men are
sitting torpid, unable to find their way and afraid to move.

Now darkness, all the world over, is the emblem of three
things--ignorance, impurity, sorrow. And all men who are rent
away from Jesus Christ, or on whom His beams have not yet fallen,
this text tells us, have that triple curse lying upon them.

Ignorance. Think of what, without Jesus Christ, the world has deemed
of the unseen, and of the God, if there be a God, that may inhabit
there. He has been to them a great Peradventure, a great Terror, a
great Inscrutable, a stone-eyed Fate, a thin, nebulous Nothing, with
no emotion, no attributes, no heart, no ear to hear, the nearest
approach to nonentity, according to the despairing saying of a
master of philosophy, that 'pure Being is equal to pure Nothing.'
And if all men do not rise to such heights of melancholy abstraction
as that, still how little there is of blessed certainty, how little
clearness of conception of a Divine Person that turns to us with
love and tenderness in His heart, apart from Christ and His
teaching! If you take away from civilised men all the knowledge of
God that they owe to Jesus Christ, what have you left? The ladder by
which they climbed is kicked away by a great many people nowadays,
but it is to Him that they owe the very conceptions in the name of
which some of them turn round and deny Him.

Ignorance of God, ignorance of one's own self and of one's deepest