on their general conduct, and does not even keep them from corruption, to say nothing of making them sources of purifying influence.  You cannot lay the flattering unction to your souls that the reason why there is so little difference between the Church and the world to-day is because the world has grown so much better.  I know that to a large extent the principles of Christian ethics have permeated the consciousness of a country like this, and have found their way even amongst people who make no profession at all of being Christians.  Thank God for it; but that does not explain it all.

If you take a red-hot ball out of a furnace and lay it down upon a frosty moor, two processes will go on—­the ball will lose heat and the surrounding atmosphere will gain it.  There are two ways by which you equalise the temperature of a hotter and a colder body:  the one is by the hot one getting cold, and the other is by the cold one getting hot.  If you are not heating the world, the world is freezing you.  Every man influences all men round him, and receives influences from them, and if there be not more exports than imports, if there be not more influences and mightier influences raying out from him than are coming into him, he is a poor creature, and at the mercy of circumstances.  ’Men must either be hammers or anvil’;—­must either give blows or receive them.  I am afraid that a great many of us who call ourselves Christians get a great deal more harm from the world than we ever dream of doing good to it.  Remember this, ‘you are the salt of the earth,’ and if you do not salt the world, the world will rot you.

Is there any difference between your ideal of happiness and the irreligious one?  Is there any difference between your notion of what is pleasure, and the irreligious one?  Is there any difference in your application of the rules of morality to daily life, any difference in your general way of looking at things from the way of the ungodly world?  Yes, or No?  Is the salt being infected by the carcass, or is it purifying the corruption?  Answer the question, brother, as before God and your own conscience.

Then there is another thing.  There can be no doubt but that all round and shared by us, there are instances of the cooling of the fervour of Christian devotion.  That is the reason for the small distinction in character and conduct between the world and the Church to-day.  An Arctic climate will not grow tropical fruits, and if the heat have been let down, as it has been let down, you cannot expect the glories of character and the pure unworldliness of conduct that you would have had at a higher temperature.  Nor is there any doubt but that the present temperature is, with some of us, a distinct loss of heat.  It was not always so low.  The thermometer has gone down.