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I. LOOK AT WHAT IS HERE SO EXPRESSIVELY SYMBOLIZED. "Salt is good." Salt is a necessary of life, and it is an essential element of true altar service. There was no real sacrifice without salt.

1. It is the symbol of the covenant of everlasting mercy, but of ever. lasting mercy as the basis of a sinner's new life. There is a purpose of grace. God wills not the death of sinners, but their re-union with Him as the God of life. That purpose does not change. God pursues it in spite of the infatuation, the wilfulness, the ingratitude of men; and "He will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth." "Salt is good." It is the salt of the great sacrifice for sin. "It is the salt of the covenant of thy God." He receives, and pardons, and renews, and cleanses all who believe on His Son Jesus Christ. No man can be saved but through the Divine mercy, and by an action of the Divine Spirit on mind and heart.

2. Salt symbolizes not only God's covenant of mercy with man, but man's covenant with God. Salt was a human offering on the altar, according to a Divine appointment. It meant, on the part of the offerer, the laying aside of enmity; it meant the submission of the offerer to the terms of the Merciful Sovereign; it meant the surrender of the will — of the life — to the Divine service. Salt symbolizes human consecration.

3. Salt is also the principle of counteractive grace. Antiseptic. The new principles of Divine life in the spirit arrest moral decay; work against the downward, earthly, immoral tendencies and temptations of the heart.

4. Salt symbolizes the preventive, corrective, life-nourishing power of the Christian society in the world.

5. Salt is also the principle of peace. "Peace with God" comes of salt within. With surrender to Him reconciliation is "effected; and there is now no condemnation, and no dread, and no discord — man and God live in harmony the perfectest.

II. THE SAVIOUR'S LESSON CONCERNING THE DETERIORATION OF THE SALT. Salt symbolizes God's covenant of mercy in its unchangeableness; and there can be no deterioration of that; but there may be a careless feeling concerning its excellence, its necessity, and its grace. Salt symbolizes man's covenant with God — the principle of entire self-surrender; it symbolizes the principle of counteractive grace both in the individual and the Church; and it is the principle of individual and social peace. Of these our Lord declares —

1. The possibility of deterioration. "If the salt have lost its savour." Rock salt exposed to the atmosphere becomes utterly tasteless and insipid; it comes to lack all the essential characteristics of its own nature. Whatever the truth may be on the Divine side of the great fact of human redemption, on the human side we are obliged to admit the possibility of a fall from grace. It is involved in the very fact that it is a free human spirit which is being dealt with.

2. Christ marks here three things as characteristic of men in this state.

(1) They are useless for any good purpose whatever — useless in the Church, useless in the world. What shall be seasoned with such salt? It is useless to make anything grow. It is a heap and nothing more — neither man nor beast can ever be the better for its existence.

(2) Such characters are utterly contemptible. They are neither fit for the land nor yet for the dunghill, which, if it does not grow itself, helps other things to grow.

(3) And last of all they are rejected with utter disdain. "It is henceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men." It must not be allowed even to occupy the place of the real thing. There can be no fellowship between life and death.

(The Preacher's Monthly.).

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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?