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 men’s minds; and it has gone on appealing to them ever since. Had it been uttered to neolithic man, it would have been merely unintelligible, with no imaginable relation to the experiences of life; whereas it has a very obvious relation now. Earth was then in the toils not of a moral but of a physical problem, demanding a straightforward physical solution; and the salting of the earth consisted then very largely in the indomitable courage and obstinacy with which man--the crude struggling biped--stood up against the larger and more powerful forms of life which barred the way of his advance toward civilisation--just as previously, the salting of the earth (the preparing it for a higher form of life) depended upon the huge and uncouth antediluvian monsters which devoured and trod down the overwhelming growths of marsh and jungle. And from that first salting of the earth, lasting through so many ages, it is no wonder that much of the old physical recipe still survives; and that the history of civilisation has shown us a process in which ruthless extermination by war was regarded as the best means of establishing God’s elect upon earth. The doctrine that force is a remedy, or a security for moral ends, dies a slow death in the minds of men. Institutional Christianity has, by its traditions and its precepts, done all it could to keep it alive. We still have read to us in our churches--for our approving acceptance--a proposition made by the Children of Israel to a neighbouring tribe, precisely similar to that made five years ago by Germany to Belgium. And the inference left on the minds of Christian congregations, generation after generation, has been that God quite approved of it (and of the ruthless devastation which followed) as a means for making his chosen people the salt of the earth.