Ephesians 5:8

Ye were sometimes darkness,— St. Paul, to express the great darkness in which the Gentiles were, calls them darkness itself. The kingdom of Satan over the Gentile world was a kingdom of darkness. See ch. Ephesians 6:12. And so, on the other hand, we find Jesus is pronounced by Simeon a light to lighten the Gentiles, Luke 2:32. The parenthesis in Ephesians 5:9 serves to give us the literal sense of all that is here required by the Apostle in this allegorical discourse of light. See Colossians 1:12