THE TRUE VINE.

CHAPTER I.

THE TRUE VINE.

"I am the true Vine."-JOHN XV. I.

PROFOUND and far-reaching meanings are often

hid in words. Like boulders left on the strand, confirming a geologist's theory of nature, they lie as it were on the shore of the present, and reveal to us strange glimpses of a former state of things. Among the most interesting of such terms is the word parable. It means literally a placing of one thing beside another, not for the purpose of comparison but of completion. And so interpreted, what a significant testimony does. it bear to the blind and ignorant condition of fallen man ! Previous to the expulsion from Eden, nature was a mirror in which heaven was seen as clearly reflected as the blue sky in the depths of a placid lake. There were not two separate worlds, but one. The earthly shadow was always associated in the mind of

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Adam with its heavenly substance; he needed no parable or symbol to teach him the truths of the unseen and the eternal, for everything around him was symbolic of spiritual truth; creation was one great revelation of God. This is abundantly evident from the fact that natural objects alone, as embodying spiritual truths, are mentioned in the beginning of Genesis; such as the garden, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, the command "be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth." But his iniquity separated between his soul and God, and then as a necessary consequence between the natural and the spiritual worlds. The eating of the forbidden fruit in one sense opened his eyes, and he saw two separate independent worlds instead of one, just as the telescope resolves the single star into two stars sweeping round a common centre, having a certain local contiguity, but never uniting or blending into one another. In another sense sin blinded him, brought the scales of unbelief over the purity of his vision, dropped a thick veil between him and the glory and meaning of the inner shrine of nature, so that he could penetrate no more into the holy of holies among the sacred mysteries, but was obliged to dwell in the outer courts among the common uses of things. The key of knowledge was taken away from him who aspired to be as God; he lost the power of decyphering the hieroglyphics inscribed on sky and stream and hill; spiritually as well as literally, he hid himself from God, and God hid Himself from him among the trees of the garden. Walking among objects fitted by their very nature to

I.

CHRIST THE INTERPRETER.

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suggest spiritual realities to his mind, he saw nothing but the common appearances of nature, and had no thoughts beyond their earthly uses. The articulate message of God seemed to be mere thunder, and the personal vision of His glory a mere lightning flash.

Such was the blindness, because of spiritual defection, which had fallen upon man, God's high-priest, in the very temple where formerly everything was as full of meaning to him as was the furniture of the tabernacle to Aaron. To cure this blindness, the second Adam came into the world.. The Living Ladder, in His descent and in His ascension-not as in a dream to the sleeping patriarch, but in open reality to the shepherds and disciples-He united earth to heaven; the Son of God and the Son of man, as the Mediator He reconciled man to God; the Creator and the First-Born of every creature, He joined together once more the seen and the unseen which man's sin had divorced. He showed that nature was His Father's house, a grand temple with divinely-pictured windows. Standing without, man saw nothing but the merest outline of dusky shapes, and had no idea of the combined scheme and purport of the picture. But the True Light by spiritual insight brought him into the interior, and there every ray revealed a harmony of unspeakable splendours. Constantly, in His discourses, He revealed the hidden glory of all creation. Not more frequently did He appeal to the written revelation of the Old Testament which He himself had given, in the formula "It is written,"