in the tendance and culture of men with
the watchful, fond interest with which the vinedresser tends his plants
through every stage of growth and every season of the year, and even
when there is nothing to be done gazes on them admiringly and finds
still some little attention he can pay them; but all in the hope of
fruit. All this interest collapses at once, all this care becomes a
foolish waste of time and material, and reflects discredit and ridicule
on the vinedresser, if there is no fruit. God has prepared for us in
this life a soil than which nothing can be better for the production of
the fruit He desires us to yield; He has made it possible for every man
to serve a good purpose; He does His part not with reluctance, but, if
we may say so, as His chief interest; but all in the expectation of
fruit. We do not spend days of labour and nights of anxious thought, we
do not lay out all we have at command, on that which is to effect
nothing and give no satisfaction to ourselves or any one else; and
neither does God. He did not make this world full of men for want of
something better to do, as a mere idle pastime. He made it that the
earth might yield her increase, that each of us might bring forth fruit.
Fruit alone can justify the expense put upon this world. The wisdom, the
patience, the love that have guided all things through the slow-moving
ages will be justified in the product. And what this product is we
already know: it is the attainment of moral perfection by created
beings. To this all that has been made and done in the past leads up.
"The whole creation groaneth and travaileth,"--for what? "For the
manifestation of the sons of God." The lives and acts of good men are
the adequate return for all past outlay, the satisfying fruit.

The production of this fruit became a certainty when Christ was planted
in the world as a new moral stem. He was sent into the world not to make
some magnificent outward display of Divine power, to carry us to some
other planet, or alter the conditions of life here. God might have
departed from His purpose of filling this earth with holy men, and might
have used it for some easier display which for the moment might have
seemed more striking. He did not do so. It was human obedience, the
fruit of genuine human righteousness, of the love and goodness of men
and women, that He was resolved to reap from earth. He was resolved to
train men to such a pitch of goodness that in a world contri