Pax Vobiscum | Page 8

along
this path.

HOW FRUITS GROW
Were rest my subject, there are other things I should wish to say about
it, and other kinds of Rest of which I should like to speak. But that is
not my subject. My theme is that the Christian experiences are not the
work of magic, but come under the law of Cause and Effect. And I
have chosen Rest only as a single illustration of the working of that
principle. If there were time I might next run over all the Christian
experiences in turn, and show how the same wide law applies to each.
But I think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this further
exercise to yourselves. I know no Bible study that you will find more
full of fruit, or which will take you nearer to the ways of God, or make
the Christian life itself more solid or more sure. I shall add only a
single other illustration of what I mean, before I close.
Where does Joy come from? I knew a Sunday scholar whose
conception of Joy was that it was a thing made in lumps and kept

somewhere in Heaven, and that when people prayed for it, pieces were
somehow let down and fitted into their souls. I am not sure that views
as gross and material are not often held by people who ought to be
wiser. In reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause and Effect as pain.
No one can get Joy by merely asking for it. It is one of the ripest fruits
of the Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be grown. There is a very
clever trick in India called the mango-trick. A seed is put in the ground
and covered up, and after divers incantations a full-blown mango-bush
appears within five minutes. I never met any one who knew how the
thing was done, but I never met any one who believed it to be anything
else than a conjuring-trick. The world is pretty unanimous now in its
belief in the orderliness of Nature. Men may not know how fruits grow,
but they do know that they cannot grow in five minutes. Some lives
have not even a stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they did grow
in five minutes. Some have never planted one sound seed of Joy in all
their lives; and others who may have planted a germ or two have lived
so little in sunshine that they never could come to maturity.
Whence, then, is joy? Christ put His teaching upon this subject into one
of the most exquisite of His parables. I should in any instance have
appealed to His teaching here, as in the case of Rest, for I do not wish
you to think I am speaking words of my own. But it so happens that He
has dealt with it in words of unusual fulness.
I need not recall the whole illustration. It is the parable of the Vine. Did
you ever think why Christ spoke that parable? He did not merely throw
it into space as a fine illustration of general truths. It was not simply a
statement of the mystical union, and the doctrine of an indwelling
Christ. It was that; but it was more. After He had said it, He did what
was not an unusual thing when He was teaching His greatest lessons.
He turned to the disciples and said He would tell them why He had
spoken it. It was to tell them how to get Joy. "These things have I
spoken unto you," He said, "that My Joy might remain in you and that
your Joy might be full." It was a purposed and deliberate
communication of His secret of Happiness.
Go back over these verses, then, and you will find the Causes of this
Effect, the spring, and the only spring, out of which true Happiness
comes. I am not going to analyse them in detail. I ask you to enter into
the words for yourselves. Remember, in the first place, that the Vine

was the Eastern symbol of Joy. It was its fruit that made glad the heart
of man. Yet, however innocent that gladness--for the expressed juice of
the grape was the common drink at every peasant's board--the gladness
was only a gross and passing thing. This was not true happiness, and
the vine of the Palestine vineyards was not the true vine. Christ was
"the true Vine." Here, then, is the ultimate source of Joy. Through
whatever media it reaches us, all true Joy and Gladness find their
source in Christ. By this, of course, is not meant that the actual Joy
experienced is transferred from Christ's nature, or is something passed
on from