more fruit.

Thus, says Christ, the main thing that is needed--not, indeed, to
improve the life in the branches, but to improve the branches in
which the life is--is excision. There are two forms of it given here
--absolutely dead wood has to be cut out; wood that has life in it,
but which has also rank shoots, that do not come from the all-
pervading and hallowed life, has to be pruned back and deprived of
its shoots.

It seems to me that the very language of the metaphor before us
requires us to interpret the fruitless branches as meaning all those
who have a mere superficial, external adherence to the True Vine.
For, according to the whole teaching of the parable, if there be any
real union, there will be some life, and if there be any life, there
will be some fruit, and, therefore, the branch that has no fruit has
no life, because it has no real union. And so the application, as I
take it, is necessarily to those professing Christians, nominal
adherents to Christianity or to Christ's Church, people that come to
church and chapel, and if you ask them to put down in the census
paper what they are, will say that they are Christians--Churchmen or
Dissenters, as the case may be--but who have no real hold upon Jesus
Christ, and no real reception of anything from Him; and the 'taking
away' is simply that, somehow or other, God makes visible, what is a
fact, that they do not belong to Him with whom they have this nominal
connection.

The longer Christianity continues in any country, the more does the
Church get weighted and lowered in its temperature by the aggregation
round about it of people of that sort. And one sometimes longs and