It is said that if a grapevine be planted in the neighborhood of a well, its roots, running silently underground, wreathe themselves in a network round the cold, clear waters, and the vine’s putting on outward greenness and unwonted clusters and fruit is all that tells where every root and fibre of its being has been silently stealing. So, those loves are most fatal, most absorbing, in which, with unheeded quietness, every thought and fibre of our life twines gradually around some human soul, to us the unsuspected wellspring of our being. Fearful it is, because so often the vine must be uprooted, and all its fibres wrenched away; but till the hour of discovery comes, how is it transfigured by a new and beautiful life! * * * * * [Sidenote: Personal magnetism.] Gradually an expression of intense interest and deep concern spread over the listeners; it was the magnetism of a strong mind, which held them for a time under the shadow of his own awful sense of God’s almighty justice. * * * * * It is said that a little child once described his appearance in the pulpit by saying, “I saw God there, and I was afraid.” * * * * * [Sidenote: Soul-growth.] There is a ladder to heaven whose base God has placed in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes, till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the image of the divine. At the very top of this ladder, at the threshold of Paradise, blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade where the soul knows self no more, having learned, through a long experience of devotion, how blest it is to lose herself in that eternal Love and Beauty, of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but the dim type, the distant shadow. * * * * * [Sidenote: Discipline.] It is said that gardeners sometimes, when they would bring a rose to richer flowering, deprive it, for a time, of light and moisture. Silent and dark it stands, dropping one faded leaf after another, and seeming to go down patiently to death. But when every leaf is dropped, and the plant stands stripped to the uttermost, a new life is even then working in the buds, from which shall spring a tender foliage, and a brighter wealth of flowers. So, often in celestial gardening, every leaf of earthly joy must drop, before a new and divine bloom visits the soul. * * * * * [Sidenote: Idealizing power of love.]