prophecy of the Servant of the Lord, the figure that rises before
Isaiah's vision fluctuates between that which is clearly the
collective Israel and that which is, as clearly, the personal
Messiah; so the 'Christ' is not only the individual Redeemer who
bears the body of the flesh literally here upon earth, but the whole
of that redeemed Church, of which it is said, 'It is His body, the
fullness of Him that filleth all in all.'

II. Now note, secondly, the Husbandman, and the dressing of the vine.

The one tool that a vinedresser needs is a knife. The chief secret of
culture is merciless pruning. And so says my text, 'The Father is the
Husbandman.' Our Lord assumes that office in other of His parables.
But here the exigencies of the parabolic form require that the office
of Cultivator should be assigned only to the Father; although we are
not to forget that the Father, in that office, works through and in
His Son.

But we should note that the one kind of husbandry spoken of here is
pruning--not manuring, not digging, but simply the hacking away of
all that is rank and all that is dead.

Were you ever in a greenhouse or in a vineyard at the season of
cutting back the vines? What flagitious waste it would seem to an
ignorant person to see scattered on the floor the bright green leaves
and the incipient clusters, and to look up at the bare stem, bleeding
at a hundred points from the sharp steel. Yes! But there was not a
random stroke in it all, and there was nothing cut away which it was
not loss to keep and gain to lose; and it was all done artistically,
scientifically, for a set purpose--that the plant might bring forth