decisive hand, if healing and life were to come.

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.