Salt
Henry van Dyke
“Ye are the salt of the earth.” Mattew 5:13.
This figure of speech is plain and pungent. Salt is savory, purifying, preservative. It is one of those superfluities which the great French wit defined as “things that are very necessary.” From the very beginning of human history men have set a high value upon salt and sought for it in caves and by the seashore. The nation that had a good supply was counted rich. A bag of salt, among the barbarous tribes, was worth more than a man. The Jews prized it especially, because they lived in a warm climate where food was difficult to keep, and because their religion laid particular emphasis on cleanliness, and because salt was largely used in their sacrifices.
Christ chose an image which was familiar, when He said to His disciples, “Ye are the salt of the earth.” This was His conception of their mission, their influence. They were to cleanse and sweeten the world in which they lived, to keep it from decay, to give a new and more wholesome flavor to human existence. Their function was not to be passive, but active. The sphere of its action was to be this present life. There is no use in saving salt for heaven. It will not be needed there. Its mission is to permeate, season, and purify things on earth.
Men of privilege without power are waste material. Men of enlightenment without influence are the poorest kind of rubbish. Men of intellectual and moral and religious culture, who are not active forces for good in society, are not worth what it costs to produce and keep them. If they pass for Christians they are guilty of obtaining respect under false pretenses. They were meant to be the salt of the earth And the first duty of salt is to be salty.
This is the subject on which I want to speak to you today. The saltiness of salt is the symbol of a noble, powerful, truly religious life.
You college students are men of privilege. It costs ten times as much, in labor and care and money, to bring you out where you are today, as it costs to educate the average men, and a hundred times as much as it costs to raise a boy without any education. This fact brings you face to face with a question: Are you going to be worth your salt”
You have had mental training, and plenty of instruction in various branches of learning. You ought to be full of intelligence. You have had moral discipline, and the influences of good example have been steadily brought to bear upon you. You ought to be full of principle. You have had religious advantages and abundant inducements to choose the better part. You ought to be full of faith. What are you going to do with your intelligence, your principle, your faith” It is your duty to make active use of hem for the seasoning, the cleaning, the saving of the world. Don’t be sponges. Be the salt of the earth.
Think, first, of the influence for good which men of intelligence may exercise in the world, if they will only put their culture to the right use. Half the troubles of mankind come from ignorance, - ignorance which is systematically organized with societies for its support and newspapers for its dissemination, ignorance which consists less I n not knowing thins, than in willfully ignoring the things that are already known. There are certain physical diseases which would go out of existence in the years if people would only remember what has been learned. There are certain political and social plagues which are propagated only in the atmosphere of shallow self-confidence and vulgar thoughtlessness. There is a yellow fever of literature specially adapted and prepared for the spread of shameless curiosity, incorrect information, and complacent idiocy among all classes of the population. Persons who fall under the influence of this pest become so triumphantly ignorant that they cannot distinguish between news and knowledge. They develop
a morbid thirst for printed matter, and the more they read the less they learn. They are fit soil for the bacteria of folly and fanaticism.
Now the men of thought, of cultivation, of reason, in the community ought to be an antidote to these dangerous influences. Having been instructed in the lessons of history and science and philosophy they are bound to contribute their knowledge to the service of society. As a rule they are willing enough to do this for pay, in the professions of law and medicine and teaching and divinity.
.. Think, in the second place, of the duty which men of moral principle owe to society in regard to the evils which corrupt an degrade it . Of the existence of these evils we need to be reminded again and again, just because we are comparatively clean and decent and upright people. Men who live an orderly life are in great danger of doing nothing else. We wrap our virtue up in little bags of respectability and keep it in the storehouse of a safe reputation. But if it is genuine virtue it is worthy of a better purpose than that. It is fit, nay, it is designed and demanded, to be used as salt, for the purifying of human life.
文章定位：
