I. First, then, as to the high task of Christ’s disciples as here set forth.

‘Ye are the salt of the earth’!  The metaphor wants very little explanation, however much enforcement it may require.  It involves two things:  a grave judgment as to the actual state of society, and a lofty claim as to what Christ’s followers are able to do to it.

A grave judgment as to the actual state of society—­it is corrupt and tending to corruption.  You do not salt a living thing.  You salt a dead one that it may not be a rotting one.  And, Christ says by implication here, what He says plainly more than once in other places:—­’Human society, without My influence, is a carcass that is rotting away and disintegrating; and you, faithful handful, who have partially apprehended the meaning of My mission, and have caught something of the spirit of My life, you are to be rubbed into that rotting mass to sweeten it, to arrest decomposition, to stay corruption, to give flavour to its insipidity, and to save it from falling to pieces of its own wickedness.  Ye are the salt of the earth.’

Now, it is not merely because we are the bearers of a truth that will do all this that we are thus spoken of, but we Christian men are to do it by the influence of conduct and character.

There are two or three thoughts suggested by this metaphor.  The chief one is that of our power, and therefore our obligation, to arrest the corruption round us, by our own purity.  The presence of a good man hinders the devil from having elbow-room to do his work.  Do you and I exercise a repressive influence (if we do not do anything better), so that evil and low-toned life is ashamed to show itself in our presence, and skulks back as do wrong-doers from the bull’s-eye of a policeman’s lantern?  It is not a high function, but it is a very necessary one, and it is one that all Christian men and women ought to discharge—­that of rebuking and hindering the operation of corruption, even if they have not the power to breathe a better spirit into the dead mass.

But the example of Christian men is not only repressive.  It ought to tempt forth all that is best and purest and highest in the people with whom they come in contact.  Every man who does right helps to make public opinion in favour of doing right; and every man who lowers the standard of morality in his own life helps to lower it in the community of which he is a part.  And so in a thousand ways that I have no need to dwell upon here, the men that have Christ in their hearts and something of Christ’s conduct and character repeated in theirs are to be the preserving and purifying influence in the midst of this corrupt world.

There are two other points that I name, and do not enlarge upon.  The first of them is—­salt does its work by being brought into close contact with the substance upon which it is to work.  And so we, brought into contact as we are with much evil and wickedness, by many common relations of friendship, of kindred, of business, of proximity, of citizenship, and the like,—­we are not to seek to withdraw ourselves from contact with the evil.  The only way by which the salt can purify is by being rubbed into the corrupted thing.