e of our inmost nature to His inmost
nature, so that a vital connection may be formed between these two. What
we expect to receive by being connected with Christ is the very Spirit
which made Him what He was. We expect to receive into the source of
conduct in us all that was the source of conduct in Him. We wish to be
in such a connection with Him that His principles, sentiments, and aims
shall become ours.

On His side Christ has laid bare His deepest feelings and spirit. In His
life and in His death He submitted to that severest operation which
seemed to be a maiming of Him, but which in point of fact was the
necessary preparation for His receiving fruitful branches. He did not
hide the true springs of His life under a hard and rough bark; but
submitting Himself to the Husbandman's knife, He has suffered us through
His wounds to see the real motives and vital spirit of His
nature--truth, justice, holiness, fidelity, love. Whatever in this life
cut our Lord to the quick, whatever tested most thoroughly the true
spring of His conduct, only more clearly showed that deepest within Him
and strongest within Him lay holy love. And He was not shy of telling
men His love for them: in the public death He died He loudly declared
it, opening His nature to the gaze of all. And to this open heart He
declined to receive none; as many as the Father gave Him were welcome;
He had none of that aversion we feel to admit all and sundry into close
relations with us. He at once gives His heart and keeps back nothing to
Himself; He invites us into the closest possible connection with Him,
with the intention that we should grow to Him and for ever be loved by
Him. Whatever real, lasting, and influential connection can be
established between two persons, this He wishes to have with us. If it
is possible for two persons so to grow together that separation in
spirit is for ever impossible, it is nothing short of this Christ seeks.

But when we turn to the cutting of the branch, we see reluctance and
vacillation and much to remind us that, in the graft we now speak of,
the Husbandman has to deal, not with passive branches which cannot
shrink from his knife, but with free and sensitive human beings. The
hand of the Father is on us to sever us from the old stock and give us a
place in Christ, but we feel it hard to be severed from the root we have
grown from and to which we are now so firmly attached. We refuse to see
that the old tree is doomed t