And men haven't changed, nor the diseases that hurt their life, nor the Master, nor the tender love of His heart. But there's more than knife; there's fulness of life following. He would have us get the life even though it means the knife. Most times--every time, shall I say?--the life comes only through the knife. Yet when the life has come, with its great tireless strength, and its deep breathing, and sheer delight of living, you are grateful for the knife that led the way to such life. One day our Lord entered a vigorous protest against the wrong sort of salt,[47] saltless salt, the sort that seemed to be salt, and you used it and depended on it, and then found how unsalty it was, for the thing you depended on it to preserve, had gone bad. The great need is for salty salt. There still seems to be a great lot of this saltless salt in use. It's labelled salt, and so it's used as salt, but it befools you. The saltiness has been lost out, and the man using it wakes up to find out how great is the loss, loss of what he thought he had salted, and loss of time, character and time, the character of that salted with saltless salt, and the time spent. It would be an immense clearing of the religious situation to-day on both sides of the Atlantic, if the saltless salt could be got rid of, either by removing the unsaltiness in it--though that seems a hopeless task, it's so unsalty, and there is so much of it, and such a large proportion of it, and it's so well content with being just as unsalty as it is. _Or_, the only other thing is put very simply and vigorously by the Lord in a short intense sentence, "Cast it out." Out with it. And lots of it _is out_ so far as preservative usefulness is concerned. And yet with wondrous patience He puts up with a great deal of salt that seems to have nearly reached the utterly saltless stage, hoping to get rid of the unsaltiness, and then to give it a new saltiness. For, be it keenly marked, when the saltiness has quite gone out of the salt, when the preservative quality has quite gone out from that body of people which He has placed in the world as its moral preservative,--then look out. Aye, "look up,"[48] for that's the only direction from which any help can relieve the desperateness of the situation. And "lift up your heads," for then comes a new preservative to the rotting earth-life. But some of us will smell the smell of the decay before the new salt begins to work. The Thing in Us That Wants Things.