Thus the words of our Lord, spoken immediately after He had instituted the priesthood according to the order of Melchisedec, committing to it the sacrifice of His Body and Blood, were marvellously accomplished. "I am the true Vine, and My Father is the husbandman.—Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the Vine, you the branches: he that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing." The human nature which He had taken had sent forth, in virtue of the Person who took it, the triple power bestowed upon it: His priesthood, His teaching, and His rule had occupied the earth. All the nations composing the Roman Empire had brought in their first-fruits to form clusters of the mystical Vine. They had made the triple offering of the Eastern kings from the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa to the Royal Infant; to the King they had given their gold, for His sake and after His likeness becoming poor; to the God their frankincense, worshipping Him at the altar of His love; to the Victim their myrrh, presenting to Him their bodies as a sacrifice, in repetition of His martyrdom. It was the very scoff of the heathen philosopher and magistrate that any one could think to reduce to one worship the various rites of the Empire, a conglomeration of European, Asiatic, and African superstitions. Out of that seemingly hopeless diversity, that endless antagonism, He had constructed a divine unity, a table at which the children of Scipio knelt side by side with the vilest slave, at which many an Aspasia became a penitent, and a Boniface sent back as holy relics to his mistress, Aglae, the body in which he had sinned with her. The vine of the synagogue, planted of old with the choicest care, and protected from the inroads of wild beasts in the security of a single nation of brethren, had brought forth but wild grapes, and therefore it had been plucked up; its hedge had been broken down and its tower ruined. Instead of it, the Vine of His Body had grown abundantly, and from its single root, to use Tertullian's application of the parable, suckers had been carried everywhere, and the harvest of its vintage rendered the earth fruitful; the hills and the valleys of many vast regions were covered with its grapes. But this itself was but the beginning of a vaster growth in the future, the first realisation of an ever-expanding kingdom. Only it was a complete specimen of all that should be. This generation of the Christian people from the person of Christ was the one miracle which St. Chrysostom thought no heathen could deny.