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God can take the most soiled soul and give to it radiant beauty. A piece of black carbon set in the electric current blazes with dazzling light. Queen Victoria stopped one day at a paper mill near Windsor Castle, and was shown through it by the foreman; he did not know who she was, as she was alone, save one attendant, and was plainly dressed. The queen was intensely interested in every process of the paper maker’s art. She was conducted at last to a place where a number of rag pickers were emptying out the dirty rags which they had gathered from the gutters and alleys of the great city. There was a large pile of these filthy, blackened rags, which looked as if they never could be made clean. The queen asked the foreman what he could do with these. To her amazement he told her that he would make them into the finest, whitest paper. When the queen had gone, the foreman learned who she was. Some days after there was received at the palace a package of the purest, most delicate paper, having the queen’s likeness stamped upon it, with a note from the foreman of the mill telling her that this paper was made from the very rags she had seen on the occasion of her visit.
So it is that the Holy Ghost takes human lives, ruined and blackened by sin, makes them whiter than snow, and stamps upon them the seal of God, the divine likeness. No life is hopeless in its ruin that will submit itself to the renewing, transforming grace of Christ.