and growth.

XIV

The Story of the Vine

"I am the true Vine, and My Father is the Husbandman."--JOHN xv. I.

We have now a story to tell which, in the eye of heaven, will make our
world forever memorable and wonderful among her sister spheres. It is
the story of the Vine, and how it was the Divine purpose our earth
should be its fruitful soil, and our race intimately associated with
its growth and history.

"I am the _true_ Vine," said our Lord. Not improbably, as He was
passing forth with His disciples into the moonlit air, He perceived a
vine clustering around the window or door; and with an eye ever awake
to each touch of natural beauty, and a heart always alert for spiritual
lessons, He turned to them and said, What that vine is in the world of
nature I am in relation to all true and faithful souls. I am the
_true_ Vine--true, not as opposed to false, but true in the sense of
real, substantial, and enduring. The essential, as distinguished from
the circumstantial; the eternal, as distinct from the temporary and
transient.

Nature is a parable of God. In each of her forms we have a revelation
of God. Not so complete as that given through the mind of prophets, or
the life of Jesus Christ, but still a revelation of the Divine. Each
natural object, as it stood in Eden's untainted beauty, displayed some
aspect of Him, whom no man can see and live. The apple-tree among the
trees of the wood; the rose of Sharon: the lily of the vale; the cedar,
with its dark green foliage; the rock for strength; the sea for
multitudinousness; the heaven with its limpid blue, like the Divine
compassion, overarching all--these are some of the forthshadowings in
the natural world of spiritual qualities in the nature of God. The
vine was made the clinging, helpless plant it is, that it might forever
remind men of certain deep characteristics of the Divine nature.

I. THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES.--_The unity of the vine_. The vine and
its branches constitute one plant. Some branches may be trailed along
the trellis-work outside the cottage door, others conducted through
hothouse after hothouse; yet one life, one stream of sap, one essential
quality and character pervades them all, from the dark root, buried in
the soil, to the furthest twig or leaf. Yonder branch, waving its
fronds high up against the hothouse glass, cannot say to that long
leafless branch hidden beneath the shelf, You do not belong to me, nor
I t