SPIRITUAL ROOT-PRUNING.
By Examiner; Chronicle
THERE is an operation in husbandry known as "root-pruning," which consists in cutting away a portion of the roots with the object of promoting fruitfulness in unproductive trees. By this process, judiciously applied, thrifty trees whose vigorous fullness of life has hitherto been employed in the production of needless wood and leaves can be made to yield abundant crops. Something analogous to this seems often to be required in the world of Christian experience. Many Christians whose lives are miserably barren of spiritual results have vitality enough; but their energy is all directed into secular channels. Even if they manage to devote a little of their valuable time to church affairs, their efforts are strictly confined to what may be called the machinery of religion, to the exclusion of the spiritual labors in which it is at once their duty and their privilege to share. The trouble with Christians in this unfruitful condition is that they have too strong a hold upon the world. Their affections, reversing the apostle's injunction, are set, not on things above, but upon things on the earth. There may be, it is true, very little in their lives to which, considered by itself, serious objection could be made. They may be devoted to science, art, literature, or honorable money-making,—all legitimate objects of pursuit for Christians as well as others. But the mistake they make is in not estimating these things at their true value. The first place is given them in the affections. What such Christians need is a thorough root-pruning—a loosening of their tenacious grip upon the soil of that worldliness whose rank juices are producing only a barren growth in their lives. The Master desires that his children shall bear "much fruit." He wishes, as his own words so frequently assure us, that his people should fairly estimate the relative importance of spiritual and secular things, and that the world should not be allowed to so engross the mind and heart that no place can be found for the higher claims of God and a perishing race.