be done to the end of time. In many great, true ways, living stems are still standing in the sun, with their branches strong, or feeble, or dead, about them; and the dead are still cut away, and the living pruned by the husbandman. watching and working forever in this vineyard and among the vines which he has planted.

This truth of the vines and the branches is to be understood, first of all, in a natural sense; and we are to set aside, when we look at it in this sense, what we are fond of calling mystery, but ought rather to call obscurity, and to understand that Jesus meant, first, by what he said then, that these men, sitting or standing about him that day, were to be as intimately united to him through their spirits as the branches are united to the vine were to draw their highest life through him from God, as these branches drew their sap through the stem from the earth, and were to drink in the sun and make the stem glorious by their fruitfulness, as did these branches on the vine; or, to demonstrate their deadness, in contrast with those that did drink in the sun and bear great clusters, and so fail to be what

they might be, not because the sap refused to run and the sun to shine, but because they did not turn sap and sun to good account by bring. ing forth good fruit.

So that the power by which Jesus first drew Peter and John to his side, and held them there, was a personal and perfectly natural power; and we are not to think of it as a mystery, except as the influence of one life and soul over another for good or evil is always a mystery. Attracted to him, this one from his tax-gathering, and that one from his fishing, they had gradually felt the influence of his spirit running through their whole life; were never quite what they ought to be when he did not inspire them; they had no such power to live by as that which in some way they felt flow. ing out of his nature into theirs; and so they came in the end to see what he meant when he said, "Without me ye can do nothing." If you take a cutting from a feeble stalk, and graft it on a vig orous stem, the books say the result will be that the graft will show a far greater vigor than it could have shown ungrafted; will reveal in fruit or flower, very clearly, the new stock from which it draws its vitality. It was so with these men.

They felt their life grow strong and good in the strength and goodness of their great Friend, and they were to feel it forever, more intensely as the years went on; then they were to send out and take in new branches in their turn; and so the true vine is at last to cover the whole earth. But whether in the world of the apostles. or in the world here and now; in the way Jesus saved Peter, or in the way you are to save the blasphemer, who loves you and is influenced by you as he is by no other man, it is always the lesser growing better by the greater; the weaker being grafted into, and drawing life from, the stronger; the Son of Man forever saved, and sanctified, and fitted for heaven by the Son of God.

So it is well worth our notice that this is, in a great general sense, a prime principle in life; and that, whatever we may say about our individual freedom, the great majority of us are only free as the branch on the vine is free; away back we join into some other personal life for our sal vation, and draw from it, as the branch from the stem, our most essential vitality and power that in a body or in a book, which is the spirit ual body of the inspire: thinker, some soul,

larger and stronger than our own, has got hold of us, and is pouring into us its life, and moulding us this very day.

When Carlyle gave his address in Edinburgh, some years ago, the great hall was filled, not with Scotchmen alone, but with men who poured in from the most distant parts of England and Europe to sit at his feet and drink in his words, because he is to them the vine, and they are the brauches. When Mr. Emerson comes to our city, there are those sitting about his feet that will hardly listen to any other living man, because he is to them the vine, and they are the branches. When the gracious and good English queen was left a widow, she found that her life was so in terwoven with the life she had lost from her side, as to bring an abandonment of sorrow such as the world has seldom witnessed, so sad it was and heavy; because, though she was queen and he was consort, he was the vine and she was the branch. So Elijah was the vine to Elisha, and David to Jonathan, and Paul to Timothy, and Socrates to Plato; and the world is full of those vines and branches, because it is a natural law of our life. I meet every day men and women

who feel that without Channing, or Parker, or Swedenborg, or Wesley, they can do nothing. The great soul has taken them in, and imparted its life to theirs. You may see, sometimes, a young man who will do no good at all until he gets a wife; but then he does really become a man. Now, such a man may scoff at the woman question, as such men sometimes do, and say the common platitudes about the inferiority of the woman's nature to that of the man, as such men often will; but a woman like that is replying, in her silent, steady life, all day long, “I am the vine, you are the branch, and without me you can do nothing." "I consider," says Dr. Arnold, "beyond all wealth, honor, or even health, is the attachment we form to noble souls; because to become one with the good, generous, and true, is to be, in a measure, good, generous, and true. yourself."

Now it follows, of course, that this which is at once so natural and universal, must be so far right; because all wrong is unnatural, and, as I ain compelled to believe, exceptional. But then it brings up this question: What life, in a body