One who sees that sight may find a new meaning and beauty in the
mystic words, 'I am the vine, ye are the branches.' It is not merely
the connection between branch and stem, common to all trees; not
merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the
grape, which made the very heathens look upon it as the sacred and
miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out
of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as fire-wood, or--after the
old Roman fashion, which I believe endures still in these parts--
buried as manure at the foot of the parent stem; not merely these,
but the seeming death of the vine, shorn of all its beauty, its
fruitfulness, of every branch and twig which it had borne the year
before, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter's
sleep; and then bursting forth again, by an irresistible inward life,
into fresh branches spreading and trailing far and wide, and tossing
their golden tendrils to the sun.
This thought, surely--the emblem of the living Church springing from
the corpse of the dead Christ, who yet should rise and be alive for
evermore--enters into, it may be forms an integral part of, the
meaning of, that prophecy of all prophecies.
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