The next step is peculiarly pathetic—­“darkened in their understanding.”  The man has shut the shutters close, and pulled the shades down tight.  Of course it’s dark inside.  He is unable to see.  First unwilling, now unable.  If the only thing that can be gotten for use as light be darkness, how intense is that darkness!  Then comes the pitiable result of acting as if darkness were man’s native air—­“the vanity of the mind.”  That word vanity 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 may be wooed back the old road to the Eden life.  Jesus is the face of God, close up, looking tenderly, yearningly, into man’s face, that his eye may be caught and held, and his heart be enchained.

Sin’s Brood.

The second great result of that Eden break has been in the growth of sin.  In the seventeenth century after that it was said that man’s heart was a breeding place of thoughts whose pictured forms were bad, only bad, with no spots of good, nor spurts of good.  A thousand years later, Moses giving the Hebrew tribes the ten commandments, adds a crowd of particulars, some of them very grewsome, which serve as mirrors to reveal the common practice of his age.  The slant down of those first centuries has evidently been increasing in its downward pitch.