t 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 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 hea