DO you know why so much of the blotting-paper that is made to-day is either red or pink? It is because the process of removing the scarlet dye of the rags that are used in its manufacture is so difficult and so expensive, that it is a practical impossibility.
Yet not altogether an impossibility. The color can be removed from the cloth of deepest crimson hue, and the reddest of rags can be turned into paper of purest white.
No dye is so difficult to remove as the deep dye of sin. No human process whatever, moral or religious, can make the sinner white. His character may change for the better; his manner of living may be amended, but the deep stain of guilt remains.
With God, however, all things are possible.
What no efforts on the sinner's part can accomplish, He can bring to pass through the cleansing power of Jesus' blood. Because of the merits and atoning value of that precious blood He can address the sinner, no matter how vile, in terms like these: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”
One day the late Queen Victoria visited a paper mill, and was conducted over the works.
When she saw the filthy, dirty rags in the "rag-room" she exclaimed: "How can these ever be made white?”
“Ah, madam," replied the owner, "I have a chemical process of great power, by which I can take the color out of even those red rags." A few days later the Queen found lying upon her writing-table a lot of the most beautifully polished paper she had ever seen. On each sheet were the letters of her name, "V. R.," and her likeness. There was also a note, which ran as follows: “Will the Queen be pleased to accept a specimen of my paper, with the assurance that every sheet was manufactured out of the dirty rags which she saw on the hacks of the poor rag-pickers, and I trust the result is such as even the Queen may admire.
“Will the Queen also allow me to say that I have had many a good sermon preached to me in my mill? I can understand how the Lord Jesus can take the poor heathen, and the vilest of the vile, and make them clean, and how, though their sins be as scarlet, He can make them white as snow. And I can see how He can put His own Name upon them; and, just as these rags may go into a royal palace and be admired, so poor sinners can be received into the palace of the Great King.”
Do you know, reader, what it is thus to be cleansed from your stains of scarlet dye; to have Christ's Name written upon you; to be made fit for His abode of light?
Is it possible that you never seriously think of these things? Can it be that you have never realized that you are deep-dyed with stains of sin, and that your only hope lies in the power of Christ's blood?
Will you not from your very soul utter the plea of the penitent: "Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." (Psa. 51:7.)
Then remember: "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." (1 John 1:7.)
Cleansed from your sin, you will be called by His Name, you will be a Christian; and your happy heart will rejoice in being made meet to be a "partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light." (Col. 1: 12.)
Is not all this worth going in for?
H. P. B.