The bond, which unites us to Our Lord is our faith and our love, a personal relationship in which we accept him with complete trust as our Lord and our God; not as a figure the past whose precepts should be followed, but as the Living Lord of the present with whom we share our being and our life.

Those who have best understood this union with him and realised it in their own lives, have endeavoured to describe it in many similes – the fire in the heated iron, the sun in the burning ray, the wax and the stamp upon it. The vine and the branches, however, have this truth which the others lack – they form a living union together.