Rightly or wrongly he is regarded as a danger or a weakness to the modern State. Personally, I think that he is rightly regarded so; for I do not see how the modern State could exist if everyone were a sincere believer in that great peace-offensive, the Sermon on the Mount, and in its great practical exposition, the Death on Calvary. The only thing I am in doubt about is whether the modern State is the better alternative. Christianity, sincerely and whole-heartedly practised, might have strange social results; it might, on the other hand, be unexpectedly pleasant and workable. But of one thing I feel quite sure; it would not--as humanity is at present constituted--be practised by any but a very small minority; and it would have to work entirely without State aid. But that minority would fulfil, for the purposes of demonstration, the condition which, I think, is necessary for all great ethical adventures: it would be pure and unadulterated. It would succeed or it would fail standing upon its own feet and not upon Cæsar’s, not relying on mixed motives or compromise, but on a single principle--the principle of loving your neighbour as yourself, and converting him from evil ways by a process of peaceful penetration. And being--and remaining, a decisive minority in the world’s affairs, its part therein would resemble the part played by salt in the chemical sanitation of the soil out of which grow the clean or the unclean things of earth which feed or which poison us. And that is the first point which I ask you to consider; the extraordinary value to society, and to the whole evolution of the human race of minorities holding extremist opinions--so extreme that they do not seem at the present day to be practical politics--and yet having a chemic influence (which would not be otherwise obtainable) for bringing into being the mind of to-morrow, which has always been, all down the ages, the work of minorities, and generally of persecuted minorities. For the Salt of the Earth is only one single constituent, which enables a better standard 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.