hours hide us from all eyes! when loneliness at once weakens the will, and empowers the temptation! Alone we fight! Yes! but others will feel, and know, the issue of that conflict!

Others, toiling, striving, suffering as we, will catch from us in the day to come, some touch of tender, helpful comfort, if now, in the hour of trial, we hold fast to God and to holiness.

Others-if we loose our grasp on purity and goodness now-others will look to us from out of their sad bitterness of soul, from out of their broken endeavours -and will look in vain! No virtue will go out from us! No fountain of living water will spring up to refresh their hot lips! The hem of our garment will bring with it no blessing, no power to heal and save!

We fight not for ourselves alone. These are theyour brethren-the cloud wherewith we walk encompassed: it is for them that we wrestle through the long night they count on the strength that we might bring them, if we so wrestle that we prevail. The morning that follows the night of our lonely trial would, if we be faithful, find us new men, with a new name of help, and of promise, and of comfort, in the memory of which others would endure bravely, and fight as we had fought.

Oh, turn to God in fear, lest, through hidden disloyalty, we have not a cup of cold water to give those who turn to us for succour in their sore need!

SERMON XIX.

THE PRUNING OF THE VINE

"I am the true Vine, and My Father is the Husbandman: every branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away, and every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth it that it may bring forth more fruit.”ST. JOHN XV. I-2.

OUR Lord has many offices, and gives Himself many names. He is the supreme Lawgiver, the unique authority; and, as such, He names Himself the Door, the narrow, but one and universal Passage, by Whom all must enter who would come into the peace of secure allegiance to God.

He is the King; and, as such, He names Himself the Good Shepherd, Who shepherds His flock with undoubted devotion, and is followed hither and thither with unwavering loyalty by the happy sheep who are known of Him by name, to the pastures of delightful tranquillity, and by the ever-flowing waters of ceaseless

content.

He is the Saviour, the Deliverer; and so names Himself the great Physician, Who will heal the brokenhearted, and bring health to them that are sick and at the point to die: yea, even though they were dead, yet shall they live, for verily, He is the Resurrection, and the Life, Whose voice the very dead shall hear, and they that hear shall live for evermore.

He is the Revealer, the Truth; and so names Himself the Light, in Whom men recognise the reality of all their works, and of all their high imaginings, and of all their longing aspirations, and to Whose blessed Light they press forward that their deeds may be made manifest that they have been wrought in God.

He is the Son of Man, Whom God has sealed to be His one and only Minister, His sole Servant; and so pronounces Himself to be to all humanity the very Bread of Life, the Flesh and the Blood, by sharing in Which mankind lays hold of eternal sustenance, and will be raised again, body and soul, complete and transfigured, at the Tremendous Day.

All this He is, and much more; and, under every figure, we seize some glimpse of our many-sided relationship to our Master and Lord, and we bless Him that gave, and we rejoice in what we receive.

But now, when the last hours of the Lord's life are hurrying to their close, and the tenderest, nearest familiarity of the last sweet converse between the Master and those whom He now deigns to call His friends, is attained :

Now, when all evil has been sifted, and purged, and cleansed, and he who received the sop has gone out into the night, and they who remain have been washed and sanctified every whit:

Now, when the Lord's heart pours out its mosi impassioned utterance, its most secret love, over the souls of those with whom He sits as He shall sit no more for ever, in the pure intimacy of human-kindness:

Now, at the close of that memorial hour, that un

forgotten feast, into which our Lord pressed all the fulness and the wonder of the crowning memories which would hereafter fix and hold the prevailing and imperishable remembrance of Him among men until His coming again :

Now, as He stands amid His chosen, His beloved, His own, with, it may be, the very cup in His hands, which but now He had blessed, and uplifted, and enriched with the Promise of that atoning Blood which He was to carry for ever from henceforth into the Holiest of Holies, before the Eyes of the Most High:

Now, He Who is, to the Church of His love, the Lord of all her innermost life, has one figure more in which to embody that hidden, unceasing, continuous intimacy of union which would, for ever and ever, draw faster and closer to Himself the souls of those who had passed, by the power of His great Sacrifice, within the secret place of His love; within the circle of His Church's perfecting grace; within that upper chamber in which for ever the Lord Jesus comes, and moves, and shows Himself, and sits at meat, and passes in and out, and breathes perpetual blessing, and shows His hands and His side, and takes the cup, and gives thanks, and gives to them whom He has sanctified, and is known in the breaking of bread.

This is the familiar intimacy which He is now sealing by His last parting words, and out of the midst of which He speaks the parable of its mysterious laws, "I am the Vine, the very and only Vine, and My Father is the Husbandman. I am the Vine, and ye are the branches. Abide in Me, for without Me ye can do nothing."

"Abide in Me."

When our Lord is describing the first activity of Faith in Him, He has another metaphor. "Come unto "He that cometh into Me shall have everlasting

Me." life." Faith begins, for man, in an act of approach. It is true such a coming can only be by virtue of God's prevenient action: all those who come are already given of God; it is the power of that gift which moves men to come; no man comes, unless God the Father draws him. Faith is a gift; it presupposes an activity on God's side: but man has still his part to play; he, too, is to be active; he, too, is a living motive-power; he has, by his own exertion, to make that act of approach which God's precedent gift of his soul to Christ has made possible. He has still to throw his own personal energy into the needful belief: he has to come, to draw near, to the life; and such coming is fulfilled when the soul has drawn so near that it can put out its hand and receive the very life that it desires; when it can feed on it, as it can on bread; when it can eat of the very Flesh, and drink of the very Blood of Him on Whom it believes. This act of eating is the crown and culmination of the act of approach. That activity of the man's free-will, which was begun in the energy by which he set himself in motion to come to the life, is continued in the energy by which he sets himself to eat and to drink of this most marvellous Food.

But the final act by which Faith attains the end of its approach, and is knit to that to which it was drawing near, and touches, and handles, and receives, and is