2. From one point of view it was an immense compliment for the disciples to be spoken of as salt. Their Master showed great confidence in them. He set a high value upon them. The historian Livy could find nothing better to express his admiration for the people of ancient Greece than this very phrase. He called them sal gentium, " the salt of the nations." But our Lord was not simply paying compliments. He was giving a clear and powerful call to duty. His thought was not that His disciples should congratulate themselves on being better than any other men. He wished them to ask themselves whether they actually had in them the purpose and the power to make other men better. Did they intend to exercise a purifying, seasoning, saving influence in the world ? Salt exists solely to purify, not itself, but that which needs its services. The usefulness of the Church as a separated society lies wholly in the very world from which it has been so carefully separated. It exists to redeem that world from itself. Out of love for that world it is sent by the same impulse of the Father as sent to it His only-begotten Son ; and the damning error of the Pharisee is that he arrests this Divine intention in mid career, arrests it at the point where it has reached him, arrests it for his own honour and his own benefit, refusing to let it pass through him to its work on others.
(1) Salt is most largely used as an antiseptic, for allaying corruption, and for stopping the effects of climate upon animal matter ; it is a preservative of sweetness and purity in that with 1 W. Coles-Finch, Water : its Origin atid Use, 167.
104 THE SALT OF THE EARTH
which it is associated. So the presence of Christ's Church in the world, of a Christian man or woman in the smaller world of his or her own circle in society, is to be preservative : to allay corruption, to maintain life, to ward off decay and death, to uphold a standard of right, without which the world would be a far worse place than it is.
^[ " Ye " — Christians, ye that are lowly, serious, and meek ; ye that hunger after righteousness, that love God and man, that do good to all, and therefore suffer evil — "ye are the salt of the earth." It is your very nature to season whatever is round about you. It is the nature of the Divine savour which is in you to spread to whatsoever you touch ; to diffuse itself, on every side, to all those among whom you are. This is the great reason why the providence of God has so mingled you together with other men, that whatever grace you have received of God may through you be communicated to others ; that every holy temper and word and work of yours may have an influence on them also. By this means a check will, in some measure, be given to the cor- ruption which is in the world ; and a small part, at least, saved from the general infection, and rendered holy and pure before God.1
(2) To put our Lord's comparison in its full relief, however, we must add the sacrificial use of salt in Hebrew worship as well as in the rites of heathen antiquity. No offering of cakes or vegetable produce was laid on Jehovah's altar saltless; perhaps this season- ing was added even to animal sacrifices ; certainly it entered into the composition of the sacred incense. With all this in their minds, Jesus' audience could understand Him to mean no less than this, that His disciples were to act on society (Jewish society, of course, in the first place) as a moral preservative, keeping it from total decay, and fitting it to be an oblation, not distasteful, but acceptable, to Jehovah. The thought was far from a new one to the Hebrew mind. Remembering how the world before the flood perished because " all flesh had corrupted his way," except one salt particle too minute to preserve the mass; how ten men like Lot would have saved the cities of the lower Jordan ; how it marked the extreme ripeness to destruction of the Israel of Ezekiel's day, that even these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, had they been in it, could have delivered " neither son
1 John Wosley.
ST. MATTHEW v. 13 105
nor daughter " ; no Jew could miss the point of our Lord's words to His Twelve around Him, "Ye are the salt of the land." When He spoke, the corruption of His nation was extreme, as His own sermons show us ; and effete Judaism was fast ripening for its fall.
(3) Salt gives relish to what would otherwise be tasteless or unpleasant; and Christ's people are, if we may so speak, the relishing element in the world, which prevents it from being loathsome altogether to the Lord. So Lot was in the cities of the plain the one savour which made them even so long endurable. There was not much salt in Lot ; but there was a little, there was a righteous soul that at least vexed itself because of the un- righteousness around it, if it did not do very much to arrest that unrighteousness. And because of Lot, God almost spared the place, would have spared it had there been only a few more like him, or had he been just a little truer than he was. Even so Christians are to be as salt to the earth, which, without them, would be in a manner loathsome, being so possessed with mean and base and ignoble souls.