to human hearts when sin is pardoned, when moral disease is cleansed. When we become conscious that we are wholesome in God's sight, that we are free from the bondage of iniquity, we rise up with all the joy of the morning, with all the inspiration and courage of a new day, to meet the duties of life.

Another phase of this abundant life which Christ brings to us may be noted in the fact that no life comes to perfection without development and culture. Many of the most beautiful flowers known to the civilized lovers of beautiful things today have been developed from wild blossoms that were comparatively very insignificant when contrasted with the glorious creations revealed in the perfected plants we behold. The horticulturist, too, knows how to take a poor variety of blooming shrub or fruit tree, and bud into it the most beautiful variety of its class. Mark Guy Pearse tells of a briar growing in a ditch when there came along a gardener with his spade. As he dug around it and lifted it out the briar said to itself, "What is he doing that for? Does he not know that I am only an old worthless briar?" Then the gardener took it into the garden and planted it amid his flowers, while the briar said, "What a mistake he has made, planting an old briar like myself among such rose trees as these!" But the gardener came once more with his keen-edge knife, made a slit in the briar, and budded it with a rose, and by and by, when summer came, lovely roses were blooming on that old briar. Then the gardener said, "Your beauty is not due to that which came out, but to that which I put into you." That is just the way Christ beautifies and glorifies our human life. He makes our lives abundant by pouring into them his own beauty and glory; the spirit of his goodness inspires us and there blooms upon our lives blossoms of conversation and conduct which are like Christ's own life.

I know there are those who will be ready to say to me, "If what you say of Christianity is true why is it that we see so many people who call themselves Christians and yet are such poor specimens of the kind of life you describe?" Or perhaps some of you, speaking out of your own hearts, will say, "I have been trying to be a Christian for years, and God knows that I have been honest about it, but I have felt bitterly in my heart, as you have been describing this abundant life which Jesus Christ gives to his disciples, that the expression of that life which I have lived has been a poor, dwarfed and stunted thing. Why is it that Christ has not fulfilled in me

his promise of the abundant and complete life?" Is it not because you have failed to give the Saviour a fair chance at your life? Have you not withheld the greater portion of your nature for your own use, and given up but a very little part of your time and thought and purpose to him? Charles Dickens tells of a woman who was very wicked and degraded, and he says: "You might enter that woman's nature and go down a long corridor or passage, and up a flight of stairs and along another corridor, and at the far end you would come to a little door, and on that door the word 'woman' -meaning that her womanliness had retreated far back in her life until it had become most remote, and all her nature was corrupted with that which was unwomanly. Rev. F. B. Meyer says it is like that with many Christians. He says that when Jesus came into your life he meant to be a king, and to fill your whole being with the perfume of his indwelling; but you have filled one room after another with your household stuff; you have been pressing Christ backward until you have driven him to some remote closet of your being, and all your life is filled with vanity, with worldliness, with the love of money, with desire and ambition, and you will never get right until you have pitched all of these things away, and have called Christ back from his retreat, and given him the keys of your whole nature. I doubt not some need to hear just this message at this time. If you will put the keys of your life in the hands of Jesus, nothing will be taken from you that you will not be better without, and every room of your being will radiate the presence of Christ, and from the cellar of your animal life up to the observatory where faith looks out on heaven, there will be a warmth of sympathy and an atmosphere of courage and good cheer such as you have never known before. Your life will be in every way renewed and enriched when Christ comes to be without a rival, the honored and permanent guest in your heart.

Mary Lowe Dickinson, musing on that declaration concerning Christ, that "He maketh all things new," has written of it a very helpful poem which I pray may be realized in all our lives:

"Old sorrows that sat at the heart's sealed gate

Like sentinels grim and sad,

While out in the night damp, weary and late,
The King, with a gift divinely great,

Waited to make me glad;

"Old fears that hung like a changing cloud
Over a sunless day;

Old burdens that kept the spirit bowed,
Old wrongs that rankled and clamored loud-
They have passed like a dream away.

"In the world without and the world within
He maketh the old things new;

The touch of sorrow, and stain of sin,

Have fled from the gate where the King came in,
From the chill night's damp and dew.

"Anew in the heavens the sweet stars shine,
On earth new blossoms spring;

The old life lost in the Life divine,
"Thy will be mine, my will is thine,'

Is the new song the new hearts sing."

THE SIGN OF THE SCARLET

"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow."-Isaiah I : 18.

No more utterly false impression was ever abroad in this world than that which represents Christians as the followers of a blind faith. The fact that they walk by faith and not by sight is no indication that their faith is unreasoning or unintelligent. In calling the roll of the heroes of the faith in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews the writer begins with Abel and Enoch, but there is no evidence that either of these worthies, in the twilight of the world, followed God without reason. They had the testimony in their hearts that they pleased God. Noah is on that roll. The people of the time thought he was acting without reason, but they changed their minds later. Abraham lived a life of faith, and dwelt in tents in the wilderness and in the desert without complaining, but the reason he did not complain was that his faith was intelligent, not blind. "He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." Moses stands on the list of faith's heroes because in the heyday of his youth he chose rather to suffer affliction

with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. But there was nothing blind or unintelligent about that decision. A man who has been the law-giver of the race for thousands of years, was, it must be admitted, a keen-brained, far-seeing man. It was no blind faith that Moses followed. He had reason for his faith. He esteemed the approval of God more important than the friendship of the Pharaoh of Egypt, for the record assures us that in making his choice, which seemed so unwise to the Egyptian courtiers at the time, Moses "had respect unto the recompense of the reward." Rahab tied her scarlet line in the window because she believed that God would give Jericho over to its enemies. And Gideon, and Barak, and all the rest, both named and unnamed, on that heroic roll, who walked by faith and not by sight, did not walk unreasoningly. Put out of your mind and heart forever the thought that Christianity is an unreasoning religion. Self-indulgence and sin call for a man to give up his reason and shut his eyes and go blindly into the devil's trap; but God's first call is to our reason, and I have no doubt about the verdict if the Holy Spirit tonight shall cause every heart here to seriously pause and ponder the message which I bring. Hear again the divine appeal which calls us together: "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."

The moment we obey that call we are confronted with a fact which may seem commonplace as you hear it stated-and yet it is a fact the forgetting of which causes world-wide sorrow and despair-that "Sin soils the soul." The soul that was white and pure in its innocence, in its reverence toward God, in its love and sympathy for men, is soiled and dyed and stained by sin. Sin is not simply a smut or a dust like that which falls on your coat on a summer day and can be brushed off and forgotten; it is rather a poisonous acid which eats into the warp and woof of life, which stains the whiteness of the soul, and not only changes its appearance but its very substance. Many are drawn into sin who would have been saved, who would have fought off the tempter, who would have resisted the evil one until he fled, had they but realized in its true measure the deadly power of sin to soil and permanently mar and stain the soul. Much of the teaching of the day is very frivolous and misleading. In many works of fiction, and in much of the newspaper comment, sin is spoken of in a way to leave the impression

on the immature mind that it is a matter of taste or propriety; a question of policy or of expediency. People come to feel that at the worst sin is only a mistake or a blunder. An old proverb from a wicked source says about some things, "They are worse than a crime; they are a blunder." The devil was in that proverb from the beginning, and it comes from a false and cynical attitude toward our duty to God that is as lacking in wisdom as it is in reverence. A crime or a sin is always a blunder as well. But sin is worse than a mistake or a blunder of the head; it is a defect of the heart, and it leaves its mark deep in the soul's tissue.

But there is here another fact as comforting and hopeful as the first is striking and alarming, and that is that sin at its worst may be forgiven and cleansed through the divine mercy and intercession. There is something very suggestive in the two colors used here to describe sin. Scarlet and crimson were ever in the olden time considered the firmest of dyes, and the hardest to wash out. The teaching, then, is that the heart which has suffered most at the hands of the enemy need not yield to despair, for there is still hope if we will bring ourselves to reason with God.

I could bring you no more important message than this, the assurance that there is a way in God's wisdom by which the most discouraged man or woman here, you who have sinned against light and mercy until your sins shine out in your remorse like scarlet or crimson, may be cleansed and saved.

No earthly fuller can wash out the scarlet stains of sin. It is beyond the power of man's reasoning. God does not ask us to come and reason with one another. That has been the blunder of multitudes. Men have assembled in scientific conventions and have sought through the co-operation of their own intelligence to find a way for the uplifting of mankind and a method by which they might save the world. Every little while we have some Utopian scheme that proposes by a co-operative colony, or a communal settlement, or something of that kind, to do away with the ills and sorrows which afflict humanity. Others have dreams of great world-embracing schemes of socialism which are to lift the burdens from the shoulders of the oppressed. All these experiments have failed in the past, and all such will fail in the future, because they leave out of the account the fact of sin. There have been many experiments that would have worked if its members had only continued to do right. But sin ever brings unhappiness and misery, and the