Time & Perspective Quote by Joseph Barber Lightfoot

Lightfoot’s image of the future as a “dark impenetrable veil” is doing more than staging a gloomy Victorian mood; it’s a theological diagnosis of the human condition. The veil isn’t just ignorance, it’s a boundary condition: the world is not built to give us total foresight, and whatever certainty we crave is structurally denied. “Impenetrable” lands like a rebuke to the era’s growing confidence in progress and mastery - an age intoxicated by industry, empire, and the idea that knowledge would soon run out of mysteries to solve.

Then he turns the blade with “and yet we struggle.” That “yet” is the hinge: despite knowing the limits, we keep trying. The subtext is both compassionate and critical. Compassionate, because the impulse is recognizably human - anxiety demands narrative, and planning is how we metabolize fear. Critical, because the struggle hints at a spiritual misalignment: an attempt to live by sight rather than faith, to convert contingency into control.

As a theologian in a century that watched science and biblical criticism unsettle older certainties, Lightfoot is also speaking to his own professional moment. The veil can be read as divine reserve - God’s providence is not a timeline you can audit. The line works because it doesn’t resolve the tension; it names it. We are creatures who cannot stop reaching for what we cannot hold, and that restless reach is precisely where moral and spiritual life happens.