Grace in Crystals

“Salt is good.” — Luke xiv., S-t.

THE Bible is a dictionary of the finest similes. It employs, among living creatures, storks and eagles, and doves and unicorns, and sheep and cattle; among trees, sycamores and terebinths, and pomegranates, and almonds, and apples; among jewels, pearls and amethysts, and jacinths and chrysoprases. Christ uses no stale illustrations. The lilies that he plucks for his sermons are dewy fresh; the ravens in his discourses are not stuffed specimens of birds, but warm wnth life from wing; tip to wing-tip; the fish he points to are not dull about the gills, as though long captured, but a-squirm in the wet net just brought up on the beach of Tiberias. In my text, which is the peroration of one of his sermons, he picks up a crystal and holds it before his congregation as an illustration of divine grace in the heart, when he says, what we all know by experiment, “Salt is good.”

I shall try to carry out the Saviour’s idea in this text, and in the first place say to you that grace is like salt in its beauty. In Galicia there are mines of salt with excavations and under-ground passages reaching, I am tokl, two hundred and eighty miles. Far under-ground there are chapels and halls of reception, the columns, the altars, and the pulpits of salt. When the king and the princes come to visit these mines, the whole place is illumined, and the glory of crystal walls and crystal ceilings and crystal floors and crystal columns, under the glare of the torches and the lamps, needs words of crystal to describe it. But you need not go so far as that to find the beauty of salt. We live in a land which produces fourteen millions of bushels of it in a year, and you can take the morning rail train, and in a few hours get to the saltmines and salt-springs; and you have this article morning, noon, and night, on your table. Salt has all the beauty of the snow-flake and water-foam, with durability added. It is beautiful to the naked eye, but under the glass you see the stars and the diamonds and the white tree-branches, and the splinters and the bridges of fire as the sun glints them. There is more architectural skill in one of these crystals of salt than human ingenuity has ever demonstrated in an Alhambra or St. Peter’s. It would take all time, with an infringement upon eternity, for an angel of God to tell one-half the glories in a saltcrystal. So with the grace of God: it is perfectly beautiful. I have seen it smooth out wrinkles of care from the brow; I have seen it make an aged man feel almost young again; I have seen it lift the stooping shoulders, and put sparkle into the dull eye. Solomon discovered its anatomical qualities when he said, “It is marrow to the bones.” It helps to digest the food, and to purify the blood, and to calm the pulses, and quiet the spleen; and instead of putting a man in a philosophical hospital to be experimented upon by prayer, it keeps him so well that he does not need to be prayed for as an invalid. I am speaking now of a healthy religion — not of that morbid religion that sits for three hours on a grave-stone, reading “Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs” — a religion that prospers best in a bad state of the liver! I speak of the religion that Christ preached. I suppose, when that religion has conquered the world, that disease will be banished; and that a man a hundred 3’ears of age will come in from business, and say, “I feel tired. I think it must be time for me to go,” and without one physical pang, heaven will have him.

But the chief beauty of grace is in the soul. It takes that which was hard and cold and repulsive, and makes it all over again. It pours upon one’s nature what David calls “the beauty of holiness.” It extirpates every thing that is hateful and unclean. If jealousy and pride and lust and worldliness lurk about, they are chained, and have a very small sweep. Jesus throws upon the soul the fragrance of a summer garden as he comes in, saying, “I am the rose of Sharon;” and he submerges it with the glory of a spring morning as he says, “I am the light.” Oh, how much that grace did for the three Johns! It took John Bunyan, the foul-mouthed, and made him John Bunyan, the immortal dreamer. It took John Newton, the infidel sailor, and in the midst of the hurricane made him cry out, “My mother’s God, have mercy upon me!” It took John Summerfield from a life of sin, and by the hand of a Christian edge-tool maker led him into the pulpit that burns still with the light of that Christian eloquence which charmed thousands to the Jesus whom he once despised. Ah! you may search all the earth over for any thing so beautiful or beautifying as the grace of God. Go all through the deep mine passages of Wieliczka and amidst the under-ground kingdoms of salt in Hallstadt, and show me any thing so exquisite, so transcendentally beautiful as this grace of God fashioned and hung in eternal crystals.

Again, grace is like salt, in the fact that it is a necessity of life. Man and beast perish without salt. What are those paths across the Western prairies? Why, they were made there by deer and buffalo going to and coming away from the salt “licks.” Chemists and physicians, all the world over, tell us that salt is a necessity of life. And so with the grace of God: you must have it or die. I know a great many people speak of it as a mere adornment, a sort of shoulder-strap adorning a soldier, or a light, frothing dessert, brought in after the greatest part of the banquet of life is over, or a medicine to be taken after calomel and mustard-plasters have failed to do their work; but ordinarily a mere superfluity, a string of bells around a horse’s neck while he draws the load, and in no wise helping him to draw it. So far from that, I declare the grace of God to be the first and the last necessity. It is food we must take, or starve into an eternity of famine. It is clothing, without which we freeze to the mast of infinite terror. It is the plank, and the only plank, on which we can float shoreward. It is the ladder, and the only ladder, on which we can climb away fi’om eternal burnings. And that young woman who sits before me and laughs must have it or die. It is a positive necessity for the soul. You can tell very easily what the effect would be if a person refused to take salt into the body. The energies would fail, the lungs would struggle with the air, slow fevers would crawl through the brain, the heart would flutter, and the life would be gone. That process of death is going on in many a one because they take not the salt of divine grace. The soul becomes weaker and weaker, and after a while the pulses of life will stop entirely. Stretch out that soul on the bier of eternal death! Coffin it in a groan! Strew on it wreaths of nightshade! Cover it with a pall of eternal blackness! Set no burning lamps at the head and at the feet, but rather the extinguished torches of the silly virgins whose lamps went out. Let the pall-bearers come in — Remorse and Despair and Anguish and Pain, and shoulder it, and take it away with solemn and awful tramp, remembering that they carry the corpse of a soul. “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned.” Salt, a necessity for the life of the body — the grace of God a necessity for the life of the soul.

Again I remark, that grace is like salt in abundance. God has strewn salt in vast profusion all over the continents. Russia seems built on a salt-cellar. There is one region of that country that turns out ninety thousand tons in a year. England and Russia and Italy have inexhaustible resources in this respect. Norway and Sweden, white with snow above, white with salt beneath. Austria, yielding nine hundred thousand tons annually. ISTearlyall the nations rich in it — rock-salt, spring-salt, sea-salt. Christ, the Creator of the world, when he uttered our text, knew it would become more and more significant as the shafts were sunk, and the springs were bored, and the pumps were worked, and the crystals were gathered. So the grace of’ God is abundant. It is for all lands, for all ages, for all conditions. It seems to nndergird every thing. Pardon for the worst sin, comfort for the sharpest suffering, brightest light for the thickest darkness. Around about the salt lakes of Saratoy there are ten thousand men toiling day and night, and yet they never exhaust the so OR ACE IN CRYSTALS.

saline treasures. And if the one thousand millions of

our race should now cry out to God for his mercy, there

would be enough for all; for those flirthest gone in sin,

for the murderer standing on the drop of the gallows,

for Eosenzweig, and Stokes, and Foster. It is an ocean

of mercy; and if Europe and Asia, Africa, North and

South America, and all the islands of the sea, went down

in It to-day, they would have room enough to wash and

come up clean. Let no man in this house think that

his case is too tough a one for God to act upon; though

your sin may be deep and raging, let me tell you th°at

God’s grace is a bridge not built on earthly piers, but

suspended, and spanning the awful chasm of your guilt,

one end resting upon the rock of eternal promises, and

the other on the foundations of heaven. Demetrius

wore a robe so incrusted with jewels that no one after

him ever dared to wear it; but our King, Jesus, takes

off the robe of his righteousness, a robe blood-dyed and

heaven-impearled, and reaches it out to the worst wretch

in all the earth, and says, “Put that on! wear it now!

wear it forever.”

Again, the grace of God is like salt in the way lue come at it. The salt on the surface is almost always impure — that which incrusts the Rocky Mountains and the South American pampas and in India; but the miners go down through the shafts and through the dark labyrinths, and along by galleries of rock, and, with torches and pickaxes, find their way under the very foundations of the earth, to where the salt lies that makes up the nation’s wealth. To get to the best saline springs of the earth huge machinery goes down, boring depth below depth, depth below depth, until from under the very

GRACE m CRYSTALS. 81

roots of the mountains, the saline water supplies the aqueduct. This water is brought to the surface, and is exposed in tanks to the sun for evaporation, or it is put in boilers mightily heated, and the water evaporates, and the salt gathers at the bottom of the tank — the work is completed, and the fortune is made. So with the grace of God. It is to be profoundly sought after. With all the concentred energies of body, mind, and soul we must dig for it. No man stumbles accidentally on it. We need to go down to the very lowest strata of earnestness and faith to find it. Superficial exploration will not turn it up. We must strive, and implore, and dig until we strike the spring foaming with living waters. Then the work of evaporation begins; and as when the saline waters are exposed to the sun, the vapors float away, leaving nothing but the pure white salt at the bottom of the tank, so, when the Christian’s soul is exposed to the Sun of Kighteousness, the vapors of pride and selfishness and worldliness float off, and there is chiefly left beneath pure white holiness of heart. Then, as in the case of the salt, the furnace is added. Blazing troubles, stirred by smutted stokers of darkness, quicken the evaporation of worldliness, and the crystallization of grace.

Have you not been in enough trouble to have that work go on? I was reading of Aristotle, who said there was a field of flowers in Sicily so sweet that once a hound, coming on the track of game, came to that field, and was bewildered by the perfumes, and so lost the track. Oh! that our souls might become like “a field which the Lord hath blessed,” and exhale so much of the sweetness of Christian character that the hounds of temptation, coming on our track, might lose it, and go howling back with disappointment!

But, I remark again, that the grace of God is like the salt in its preservative quality. You know that salt absorbs the moisture of articles of food and infuses them with brine, which preserves them for a long while. Salt is the great antiputreflictive of the world. Experimenters, in preserving food, have tried sugar, and smoke, and air-tight jars, and every thing else; but as long as the world stands Christ’s words will be suggestive, and men will admit that, as a great preservative, “salt is good.” But for the grace of God, the earth would have become a stale carcass long before this. That grace is the only preservative of laws, and constitutions, and literatures. Just as soon as a Government loses this salt of divine grace, it perishes. The philosophy of this day, so far as it is antagonistic to this religion, putrefies and stinks. The great want of our schools of learning and our institutions of science to-day is, not more Leydenjars, and galvanic batteries, and spectroscopes, and philosophical apparatus, but more of that grace that will teach our men of science that the God of the universe is the God of the Bible. How strange it is that in all their magnificent sweep of the telescope they have not seen the morning-star of Jesus, and that in all their experiments with light and heat they have not seen the light and felt the warmth of the Sun of Righteousness! We want more of the salt of God’s grace in our homes, in our schools, in our colleges,in oursocial life,in ourChristianity. And that which has it will live — that which has it not will die. I proclaim the tendency of every thing earthly to putrefaction and death — the religion of Christ the only preservative.

My subject is one of great congratulation to those who have within their souls this Gospel antiseptic. This salt will preserve them through the temptations and sorrows of life, and through the ages of eternity. I do not mean to say that you will have a smooth time because you are a Christian. On the contrary, if you do your whole duty, I will promise you a rough time. You march through an enemy’s country, and they will try to double up both flanks, and to cut you off from your source of supplies. The war you wage will not be with toy arrows, but sword plunged to the hilt, and spurring on your steed over heaps of the slain. But I think that God omnipotent will see you through. I think he will. But why do I talk like an atheist, when I ought to say I know he will? “Kept by the power of God through faith unto complete salvation.”

When Governor Geary, of Pennsylvania, died a few days ago, I lost a good friend. He impressed me mightily with the horrors of war. In the eight hours that it takes to come from Harrisburg to New York, he recited to me the scenes through which he had passed in the last war. He said that there came one battle upon which every thing seemed to pivot. Telegrams from Washington said that the life of the nation depended upon that struggle. He said to me: “I went into that battle, sir, with my son. His mother and I thought every thing of him. You know how a father will feel toward his son who is coming up manly, and brave, and good. Well, the battle opened and concentred, and it was awful! Horses and riders bent and twisted and piled up together: it was awful, sir! We quit firing, and took to the point of the bayonet. Well, sir, I didn’t feel like myself that day.

I had prayed to God for strength for that particular bat° tie, and I went into it feeling that I had in my right arm the strength often giants,” and as the governor brought his arm down on the back of the seat, it fairly made the car tremble. “Well,” he said, “the battle was desperate, but after a while we gained a little, and we marched on a little. I turned round to the troops and shouted, ‘Come on, boys!’ and I stepped across a dead soldier, and lo! it was my son. I saw at the first glance he was dead, and yet I did not dare to stop a minute, for the crisis had come in the battle; so I just got down on my knees, and I threw my arms around him, and I gave him one good kiss, and said, ‘Good-bye, dear,’ and sprang up and shouted, ‘Come on, boys!’” So it is in the Christian conflict — it is a fierce fight. Eternal ages seem depending on the strife. Heaven is waiting for the bulletins to announce the tremendous issue. Hail of shot, gash of sabre, fall of battle-axe, groaning on every side. We can not stop for loss or bereavement, or any thing else. With one ardent embrace and one loving kiss, we utter our farewells, and then cry, “Come on, boys! There are other heights to be captured, there are other foes to be conquered, there are other crowns to be won.”

Yet, as one of the Lord’s surgeons, I must bind up two or three wounds. Just lift them now, whatever they be. I have been told there is nothing like salt to stop the bleeding of a wound, and so I take this salt of Christ’s Gospel and put it on the lacerated soul. It smarts a little at first; but see! the bleeding stops, and lo! the flesh comes again as the flesh of a little child. “Salt is good!”