Plenty of people will tell you so, and try to deceive you with vain words, and give you arguments, and texts of scripture perhaps, to prove that sin is not sin, and that the children of light may do the works of darkness. But do not believe them, says St. Paul. They are deceivers, and their words are vain. These are the very things which bring down God’s wrath on His disobedient children. These are the bad ways which make young people, when they are married, despise, and distrust, and quarrel with each other, and live miserable lives together, as children of wrath, peevish, and wrathful, and discontented with each other, because they feel that God is angry with them, just as Adam in the garden, when he felt that he had sinned, and that God was wroth with him, laid the blame on his wife, and accused her, whom he ought to have loved, and protected, and excused. These are the bad ways which make people ashamed when they meet a good and a respectable person, make them afraid of being overheard, afraid of being found out, fond of haunting low and out-of-the-way places where they will not be seen; fond of prowling and lurching out at night after their own sinful pleasures, because the darkness hides them from their neighbours, and seems to hide them from themselves, though it cannot hide them from God. These are the sins which make men silent, cunning, dark, sour, double-tongued, afraid to look anyone full in the face, unwilling to make friends, afraid of opening their minds to anyone, because they have something on their minds which they dare not tell their neighbours, which they dare not even tell themselves, but think about as little as they can help. Do you not know what I mean? Do you not often see it in others? Have you never felt it in yourselves when you have done wrong, that dark feeling within which shows itself in dark looks? You talk of a “dark-looking man,” or a “dark sort of person;” and you mean, do you not, a man whom you cannot make out, who does not wish you to make him out; who keeps his thoughts and his feelings to himself, and is never frank or free, except with bad companions, when the world cannot see him; who goes about hanging down his head, and looking out of the corners of his eyes, as if he were afraid of the very sunshine—afraid of the light. We know that such a man has something dark on his mind. We call him a “dark sort of man.” And we are right. We say of him what St. Paul says of him in this very epistle, when he says, that sin is darkness, and sinful works the deeds of darkness; and that goodness, and righteousness, and truth, are light, the very light of God and the Spirit of God. Our reason, our common sense, which is given us by God’s Spirit, the Spirit of light, makes us use the right words, the same words as St. Paul does, and call sin darkness.