plant, which clings to some object of support, and is incapable of standing and growing up alone. Believers in Christ exhibit, with general features of resemblance to each other, considerable personal differences of character and experience; and the plant which is to represent this quality must admit of considerable variability within certain distinct and well recognised limits. All these qualifications, and others which will be stated further on, required in the allegory, meet in the vine and in the vine alone. It is a cultivated, fruitful, perennial, branching, climbing plant; it is extremely variable under cultivation, every country and province having a special form, and new varieties being produced every year; and hence it admirably symbolises the relations of our Lord to the Father on the one hand, and to the disciples on the other.

The vine does not belong to the earlier ages of the world's history. It is never found in the shape of fossil remains in the ancient geological strata. It belongs peculiarly to the human period, and was planted in the earth shortly before its occupancy by man. It came into the world along with the beautiful rose, and the fruitful apple, and the fragrant mint, and the honeyladen bee to make an Eden of nature for man's use

and enjoyment. The previous ages were flowerless; green, monotonous tree-ferns and tree-mosses, destined to become fuel for man, alone covered the land. But blossoms and fruits came with humanity, as outbirths and representatives of spiritual principles, thus testifying to the close correspondence between nature and the

I.

ASSOCIATION WITH HUMAN HISTORY. 15

soul of man.

Prophesied by all previous vegetable forms, whose structure approached nearer and nearer to its type, the vine appeared in the fulness of the earth's time; just as He whom it shadowed forth was announced in type and prophecy from the foundation of the world, and by all His forerunners in typical personages back to Adam, and appeared in the fulness of human history when the world was ready for His reception. And thus the symbol and the person symbolised belong peculiarly to the human world, and were destined specially for human nourishment and satisfaction.

Fruit trees are associated in a remarkable manner with the history of the human race, and this is another feature of the vine's fitness for representing human qualities. We can trace the gradual diffusion of mankind and their progressive advancement in civilization, by the distribution of certain favourite fruits over the surface of the globe, and the gradual improvement of them by cultivation. Wherever man has penetrated he has carried with him and planted in the new soil the fruits upon which he depended for food or luxury. Most of our own fruits mark the different revolutions in our national history, and the great changes in our social state. To the Roman invaders we are indebted for the cherry which Lucullus brought to Rome from Pontus, as a memorial of his victory over Mithridates ; and the peach, the plum, and the pear introduced by them from Persia and Armenia are evidences that our country was once a Roman colony. By the monks,

also, who accompanied the crusades to the Holy Land, many new and valuable fruit trees were brought from the East, and planted in the monastic gardens, from whence they gradually spread over the land. In the same manner, the Spanish priests caused almost all the fruits of temperate Europe to flourish amidst the productions of the torrid zone in South America. Missionaries have introduced European fruits into India, Southern Africa, and the islands of the South Seas. This historical connection of fruits with the progress of civilization, is in no case so striking as in that of the vine. From Asia it passed into Greece and thence into Sicily; the Phoceans carried it into the south of France; the Romans planted it in Spain and on the banks of the Rhine; while British enterprise introduced it into America, Madeira, Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, where it yields an abundant vintage. A strict correlation exists between the culture of the vine, and the intellectual and spiritual development of humanity. Wherever the grape ripens, there flourish all the arts that chiefly tend to make life nobler and more enjoyable. The spread of the Christian religion and of the vine have as a general rule been coextensive, synchronous, and caused by the same events. To almost every region where the gospel has been preached the vine has extended, so that wherever the allegory of our Saviour is read, there the natural object may be seen to illustrate it.

In the symbol of the vine our Lord recognises the prefiguration in plants of animal forms and functions.

1.

PREFIGURATION OF PLANTS.

17

This prefiguration opens up to us one of the most interesting and instructive fields of study, for it helps us to a right conception of the unity of nature. As a general rule, there is nothing to be found in the world of animals, for which a parallel may not be found in the world of plants. The lower objects show distinctly and in detail what in the higher objects is obscured by their more complex organisation. We see in the trees and flowers around us interpreters of the mysteries of our own nature; mute prophesies of our own human form, character and actions. If we consider the lilies how they grow, we shall find in them, as in a picture, set forth all the incidents and experiences that make up our own life. They cease their work like us, close their eyelids and sleep every night when the sun sets, and awake to renewed activity like us when the morning comes. Their snowy blossoms, with their stamens and pistils, prefigure the purity and beauty of our human marriage; and their fragrance the sweetness of our human love. We have a foreshadowing of human birth in the bursting of the pod and the escape of the seed; and of the mother's bosom in the supply of milk-like nourishment stored up in the seed with the germ, from which the young plant draws its food till it is weaned and able to cater from the soil for itself. How beautiful is the parallel between the life of leaves and that of man, unfolding in the delicate greenness of spring, maturing in the vigour of summer, and fading away in the languor and death of autumn! In the stem, branches and foliage of the vine, we discern the ideal plan or model on which

B

our own bodies are constructed: the stem being the spinal column; the branches the ribs and members; the leaves the lungs ; while the sap-vessels, filled with their nourishing fluid, correspond with the veins and their circulating blood. The functions, too, which all these parts and organs in the vine perform are precisely analogous to those which similar parts and organs perform in the economy of man. Indeed, we cannot speak in the most literal and matter-of-fact way of the vine, without implying the profound poetic truth of prefigurement, without unconsciously philosophising and using terms first framed to denote the members of our own bodies. Upon this wonderful resemblance of man to the flowers of the field and the trees of the forest, every poetical mind has delighted to dwell, without knowing perhaps the reason. The Greeks of old pictured it in their beautiful fables of the Dryads, Daphnes and Ariels; Jotham's parable of the trees, and our Saviour's parables from the vegetable kingdom, are examples of the same deep-seated feeling. Our modern language of flowers, with all its sentimental absurdities, is an unconscious recognition of it. How touchingly does Herrick describe it in the well-known verses on the daffodils; how it glows on almost every page of Wordsworth's poetry, who believed that flowers had feeling, and that man is a tree endowed with powers of self-knowledge and self-movement, or an "arbor inversa" as the ancients called him. Shelley speaks of "a wood of sad sweet thoughts." Every one who has passed through a forest has felt what may be called its intense human