THE WORLD'S ONLY HOPE.

፡ "YE," said Jesus Christ to the first disciples of his faith, "are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men."

This substance was selected by him as the emblem of his religion. It is familiarly known for its power of imparting an agreeable flavor; and also for its power of preserving animal substances from decay.

The term savor, might direct our attention to the former of these properties rather than to the latter, but that the change supposed renders the substance worthless altogether: "It is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." It is supposed to lose not only its flavor, but its virtue.

To the experience of most persons in this country, this is an improbable supposition. It

is nevertheless not without foundation in fact. From the accounts of Maundrell and others, it appears that, not only on the borders of the Dead Sea, but also in other places where salt is found, the circumstance of its losing its saltness by exposure to the sun and rain, is not at all uncommon. That traveller speaks of breaking off a fragment of rock-salt in what is called the Valley of Salt, near Aleppo, the inner surface of which had its usual taste, while the outside, "though it had the sparks and particles of salt, had perfectly lost its savor."

The substance, then, in the degeneracy which Christ speaks of as possible, and in which Maundrell found it, might be called salt without saltness. It was matter without spirit; it was body without life. If it were to be mingled with animal substances, it would no longer resist their tendency to corruption. It could not be relied on: if it were, it would repay reliance with disappointment and damage.

It is not to the flavor, then, that he refers when he says, Ye are the salt of the earth, so much as to the power of resisting putrefaction and decay. He speaks of it as having an antagonizing property and, in further enforcement of that idea, he adds, Ye are the light of the world. Without light the world would be in darkness: the light opposes the darkness, and preserves the

world from its sway. It is, then, the antagonizing property of the substance-its power to resist corruption, and to preserve in healthful soundness, that with which it mingles, of which he speaks when he says, Ye are the salt of the earth.

But who did he intend should bear this character? Not his personal disciples exclusively, but all others, in every nation and in every age, who should "obtain like precious faith with them." As, in another of his expressive symbols-the parable of the leaven-the kingdom of heaven was equally represented by the remotest portions, in the circumference of the mass, as by that in the centre, with which the process began; so into whatever clime or age his religion should extend, he expected the truth of the figure to be sustained and illustrated by those who should bear the Christian name.

One thing more as to the scope of this symbol of salt. As the substance, the material of salt, is useless without its spirit; so the spirit is effective only as it acts through the medium of the material. By this we are admonished that Christianity is not to do its service to the world as a mere abstraction, but an embodied spirit-an incarnation: a spirit sending out its virtue through the life and action of its professors.

What, then, is the instruction which Christ in

tended to convey? It is this: First, by implication, that the natural tendency of human society is towards corruption and dissolution; Secondly, that the divinely appointed counter-agent is the embodied, active spirit of Christianity; and Thirdly, that when a professedly Christian body has lost the Christian spirit, it is both worthless and contemptible; deserving neither respect nor favor.

Of the truth of the first of these lessons the history of mankind is full of melancholy illustration. From the day that sin entered Eden, the progress of mankind was, in morals, downward, till "the earth was corrupt before God; and the earth was filled with violence, and God looked upon the earth, and behold it was corrupt: for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."

A second illustration is read in the moral history of the world after the flood, as it was repeopled by the righteous family of Noah. The second world began with the advantage of the instructions of patriarchal piety enforced by the warning example of the career and the overthrow of the first. Had the lesson been effective, and the virtues of the first of its generations been re

produced in those that followed, Abraham had never been called forth from the land of the Chaldees, nor Israel been planted on the hills of Palestine.

A third illustration is found in the history of that very people Israel: a nation selected and severed from the rest of mankind, and enjoying the advantage not only of a pious origin, as the inhabitants both of the antediluvian and the postdiluvian world had done before them; and the advantage of the lessons derivable from the corruption and miseries of those who had been swept away before them, as the posterity of Noah particularly had done; but also the advantage of the lessons derivable from the degradation and wretchedness of those who were living around them. An illustration this, not merely of the tendency of mankind to corruption, but a melancholy example of the force of that tendency: a force which, in their case, bore onward in triumph over the safeguards of "the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service, and the promises," which had given them a moral vantage ground above every other people.

A fourth and deeply instructive illustration of this tendency is found in those lands where the Gospel, in its first promulgation, triumphed over idolatry with its abominations; and wrought an