And once more, salt does its work silently, inconspicuously, gradually.  ‘Ye are the light of the world,’ says Christ in the next verse.  Light is far-reaching and brilliant, flashing that it may be seen.  That is one side of Christian work, the side that most of us like best, the conspicuous kind of it.  Ay! but there is a very much humbler, and, as I fancy, a very much more useful, kind of work that we have all to do.  We shall never be the ‘light of the world,’ except on condition of being ‘the salt of the earth.’  You have to play the humble, inconspicuous, silent part of checking corruption by a pure example before you can aspire to play the other part of raying out light into the darkness, and so drawing men to Christ Himself.

Now, brethren, why do I repeat all these common, threadbare platitudes, as I know they are?  Simply in order to plant upon them this one question to the heart and conscience of you Christian men and women:—­Is there anything in your life that makes this text, in its application to you, other else than the bitterest mockery?

II.  The grave possibility of the salt losing its savour.

There is no need for asking the question whether such loss is a physical fact or not, whether in the natural realm it is possible for any forms of matter that have saline taste to lose it by any cause.  That does not at all concern us.  The point is that it is possible for us, who call ourselves—­and are—­Christians, to lose our penetrating pungency, which stays corruption; to lose all that distinguishes us from the men that we are to better.

Now I think that nobody can look upon the present condition of professing Christendom; or, in a narrower aspect, upon the present condition of English Christianity; or in a still narrower, nobody can look round upon this congregation; or in the narrowest view, none of us can look into our own hearts—­without feeling that this saying comes perilously near being true of us.  And I beg you, dear Christian friends, while I try to dwell on this point, to ask yourselves this question—­Lord, is it I? and not to be thinking of other people whom you may suppose the cap will fit.

There is, then, manifest on every side—­first of all, the obliteration of the distinction between the salt and the mass into which it is inserted, or to put it into other words, Christian men and women swallow down bodily, and practise thoroughly, the maxims of the world, as to life, as to what is pleasant and what is desirable, and as to the application of morality to business.  There is not a hair of difference in that respect between hundreds and thousands of professing Christian men, and the irreligious man that has his office up the same staircase.  I know, of course, that there are in every communion saintly men and women who are labouring to keep themselves unspotted from the world, but I know too that in every communion there are those, whose religion has next to no influence