I SELECTED for my retreat this early spring morning the great vineyard that covers the sunny slope above Grenoble, and which commands a fine view of the rich valley and the beautifully-situated city below, and the splendid chain of snow-white Alps beyond.

I know I am now in the very heart of an immense vineyard, but it does not look like it. The scene all around me is like anything but a vineyard. For the vines all around me are the most unpromising, and almost forbidding things possible. They are black, dry, twisted, knotted, gnarled; hacked at the root with the vinedresser’s axe, and hewn close in all their branches by his pruning-knife. The truth is, the vines all around me, both roots and branches, are more like brands plucked from the burning, than living things with any hope of life in them. The apple-trees are already covered with snow-white blossoms. The cherry-trees and the plum-trees also are perfectly gorgeous with their gold and purple plumage. But it is only here and there that I can discover the smallest bud of green promise in all these miles on miles of vineyard. As yet though I have not been able to tell you the half of this hopeless looking scene, if you were to come to this beautiful land in autumn you would find this whole hillside simply groaning under its immense loads of gold and silver grapes.

This scene has called to my mind the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. For in that most beautiful chapter our Lord says to us that He is the true vine, that His Father is the Husbandman, and that we are the branches. Now, when we read that, and think about what we read, we at once see that our Lord was indeed the True Vine in more ways than one. Do you remember what the prophet Isaiah said about our coming Saviour hundreds of years before He was born? “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see Him there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised and we esteemed Him not.” Just as I would have despised these vines all around me this morning had I not known better.

“When our Saviour actually came to this world, all that and much more than all that, was fulfilled in Him. For He was born into a poor man’s house. He was early put to His father’s trade and worked with His hands till He began to be about thirty years of age. But all the time and in spite of appearances, He was the True Vine, and He was all the time under His heavenly Father’s husbandry.

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the Husbandman.” That is to say, no vine is ever a vine of itself. Every vine, if it had a tongue given to it, would say what the True Vine here says. It would say that it was the husbandman who had made it what it is. If I am a vine at all, it would say, it is all due to my husbandman and not at all to me. And herein is His Father glorified, when the True Vine lays Himself down in this Scripture before His Father’s feet. His holy birth, His holy upbringing, His holy life, and now His atoning death, which is at the door; all the planting, and all the watering, and all the watching that went to the production of the True Vine, is all recollected, and acknowledged, and comprehended by our Lord in that one word of His: “My Father is the Husbandman.” “The LORD do keep it,” the Heavenly Husbandman had said as He administered His holy providence all through the earthly life of His Son. “I will water it every moment. Lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day. Only let Him lay hold of My strength. Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.” Till a whole world of untold things that had passed between the Father in heaven and His Son on earth, is all wrapped up in this one acknowledging word of our Lord: “My Father is My Husbandman.” Think of all that also, all you thoughtful disciples of the Son of God.

Words would fail me to attempt to tell you the express and the immense comfort that came to me that Sunday afternoon in the vineyard above Grenoble. As I walked about among those hard, dry, hopeless-looking branches all, as it seemed to me, ready for the burning, and as these words of my Lord were then and there shed abroad in my heart, “Ye are the branches,” what a comfort came to me! For that moment, as I remember well, and will never forget, every hacked and hewn and hopeless branch around me suddenly took to itself a tongue and spake comfort to me. “Come back soon and see us,” they all said. “Come back and eat abundantly of our golden grapes in their season. Let not your heart be troubled” that whole vineyard broke out all around me in a concert of faith and hope and full assurance to me. “Keep up your heart, sir,” their thousand voices said to me. And I did it, till I came home singing the fifteenth of John to take up my own husbandry. —Alexander Whyte in The Walk, Conversation and Character of Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

I WOULD like to tell you about a miraculous experience. I don’t see what else I can call it. Our house is too small for us, and my son, who is in the carpentry line has been working on enlarging it by putting in dormer windows and an addition on the north side. At present there are just the openings for the dormers and the addition has no windows and no doors. On September 21st we had a hurricane, the wind was blowing about 90 miles an hour. So when the storm struck it seemed that only a miracle could save the house.

At the time I was alone with my three grandsons. I was almost stunned by the ferocity of the storm. As I watched I saw the big trees almost doubled by the wind. Shingles flying, and roofing paper torn off the roofs around us. All of a sudden crash after crash—one big tree after another was uprooted and split. It seemed as though our windows would be forced in. All I could do was to stand in the middle of the room and pray: “Peace be still! This is God’s House and where God dwells there is safety. God is The Only Power and Presence and God is Love. God Is Pure Consciousness. In Pure Consciousness there are no destructive forces!” I don’t remember ever praying so earnestly—hanging on to God for dear life. The storm lasted about three hours. A miracle really did happen and our house was untouched and all of us safe.