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It would take all time with an infringement upon eternity, for an angel of God to tell one-half the glories in salt-crystal. So with the grace of God; it is perfectly beautiful. Solomon discovered its anatomical qualities when he said, "It is marrow to the bones." I am speaking now of a healthy religion — not of that morbid religion that sits for three hours on a gravestone reading Hervey's "Meditations Among the Tombs." I speak of the religion that Christ preached. I suppose when that religion has conquered the world that disclose will be banished. But the chief beauty of grace is in the soul. It takes that which was hard, and cold, and repulsive, and makes it all over again. It pours upon one's nature what David calls "the beauty of holiness." It extirpates everything that is hateful and unclean. It took John Bunyan the foul-mouthed, and made him John Bunyan the immortal dreamer. It took John Newton, the infidel sailor, and in the midst of the hurricane made him cry out: "My mother's God, have mercy upon me!" It took John Summerfield from a life of sin, and by the hand of a Christian edged-tool maker, led him into the pulpit that burns still with the light of that Christian eloquence which charmed thousands to Jesus whom he once despised. Ah! you may search all the earth over for anything so beautiful or beautifying as the grace of God. Go all through the deep mine-passages of Wielitzka, and amid the underground kingdoms of salt in Hallstadt, and show me anything so exquisite, so transcendentally beautiful as this grace of God fashioned and hung in eternal crystals. Again, grace is like salt, in the fact that it is a necessity of life. Man and beast perish without salt. What are those paths across the Western prairies? Why, they were made there by deer and buffalo going to and coming away from the salt "licks." Chemists and physicians, all the world over, tell us that salt is a necessity of life. And so with the grace of God: you must have it or die. I know, a great many people speak of it as a mere adornment, a sort of shoulder-strap adorning a soldier, or a light, frothing dessert brought in after the greatest part of the banquet of life is over. So far from that, I declare the grace of God to be the first and the last necessity. It is a positive necessity for the soul. You can tell very easily what the effect would be if a person refused to take salt into the body. The energies would fail, the lungs would struggle with the air, slow fevers would crawl through the brain, the heart would flutter, and the life would be gone. That process of death is going on in many a one because they take not the salt of Divine grace. Again, I remark, that grace is like salt in abundance. God has strewn salt in vast profusion all over the continents. Russia seems built on a salt. cellar. There is one region of that country that turns out ninety thousand tons in a year. England and Russia and Italy have inexhaustible resources in this respect. Norway and Sweden, white with snow above, white with salt beneath. Austria yielding nine hundred thousand tons annually. Nearly all the nations rich in it — rock-salt, spring-salt, sea-salt. Christ, the Creator of the world, when He uttered our text, knew it would become more and more significant as the shafts were sunk, and the springs were bored, and the pumps were worked, and the crystals were gathered. So the grace of God is abundant. It is for all lands, for all ages, for all conditions. It seems to undergird everything. Pardon for the worst sin, comfort for the sharpest suffering, brightest light for the thickest darkness. Again, the grace of God is like salt in the way we come at it. The salt on the surface is almost always impure — that which incrusts the Rocky Mountains and the South American pampas and in India; but the miners go down through the shafts and through the dark labyrinths, and along by galleries of rock, and with torches and pickaxes find their way under the very foundations of the earth, to where the salt lies that makes up the nation's wealth. To get to the best saline springs of the earth huge machinery goes down, boring depth below depth, depth below depth, until from under the very roots of the mountains the saline water supplies the aqueduct. This water is brought to the surface, and is exposed in tanks to the sun for evaporation, or it is put in boilers mightily heated, and the water evaporates, and the salt gathers at the bottom of the tank — the work is completed, and the fortune is made. So with the grace of God. It is to be profoundly sought after. With all the concentrated energies of the body, mind, and soul, we must dig for it. Superficial exploration will not turn it up. Then the work of evaporation begins; and as when the saline waters are exposed to the sun the vapours float away, leaving nothing but the pure white salt at the bottom of the tank, so, when the Christian's soul is exposed to the Sun of Righteousness, the vapours of pride and selfishness and worldliness float off, and there is chiefly left beneath, pure, white holiness of heart. Then, as in the case of the salt, the furnace is added. Blazing troubles, stirred by smutted stokers of darkness, quicken the evaporation of worldliness and the crystallization of grace. Have you not been in enough trouble to have that work go on? But, I remark again, that the grace of God is like the salt in its preservative quality. You know that salt absorbs the moisture of articles of food, and infuses them with brine which preserves them for a long while. Salt is the great anti-putrefactive of the world. Experimenters, in preserving food, have tried sugar, and smoke, and air-tight jars, and everything else; but as long as the world stands, Christ's words will be suggestive, and men will admit that, as a great preservative, "salt is good." But for the grace of God the earth would have become a stale carcass long before this. That grace is the only preservative of laws, and constitution, and literatures. Just as soon as a government loses this salt of Divine grace it perishes. We want more of the salt of God's grace in our homes, in our schools, in our colleges, in our social life, in our Christianity. And that which has it will live — that which has it not will die. I proclaim the tendency of everything earthly to putrefaction and death — the religion of Christ the only preservative. My subject is one of great congratulation to those who have within their souls this gospel antiseptic. This salt will preserve, them through the temptations and sorrows of life, and through the ages of eternity.

(De Witt Talmage, D. D.)

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KJV: Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned?

WEB: Salt is good, but if the salt becomes flat and tasteless, with what do you season it?