of life to become established where the virtue of its presence is felt. Salt is not, and cannot be, the general constituent of life; its essence always remains a minor quantity, and yet quite definitely it affects the generality of things around it. But in itself it is an extreme, an uncompromising element; its most striking characteristic is its saltness.
It would be foolish, therefore, to blame it for not being sweet, or for not being acid, or for not being capable of taking the place of beef or mutton in the dietary of the human race, or for not making the whole human race in its own image. (The only person I ever heard of who was turned into an image of salt was Lot's wife; and as a human being it made her entirely useless). And yet, as, quite literally, the substance salt has helped the earth to become habitable, and the human race to become human, so has that symbolic salt of the earth, helped the human race to become humane, and to envisage (though not to obey) a new ethic of conduct based upon an ideal conception of the brotherhood of man.
It was the extreme expression of a new and higher moral plane to which evolution is only gradually bringing us. Had it started upon compromise it would have been useless. Its special value was, and still is, in its uncompromising enunciation of a principle which we still regard as impracticable.
But it had, at least, when it was first uttered, this degree of practicability—it appealed to
