SALT

Not only does water take its color and shape from the objects about it, as has been shown, but some of them it dissolves in greater or less degree, and with them modifies    its own quality. It dissolves little from the rocks; but salts of various kinds, sugar, and many other vegetable substances it takes up readily. And so, likewise, from a fixed, unchangeable truth, as that light and heat are from the sun, the truth of life takes almost nothing. It plays about it like water at the foot of a rock, filling itself with its colors, and adapting itself to its form; it says, “Because this is so, you must make windows in your houses, and open them towards the sun”; but it does not presume to say that the fact itself is right or wrong, practicable or impracticable. But other truths which contain suggestions as to ways of doing good-suggestions of sweetness, tartness, pungency, or other quality, are readily incorporated in the thought of life. The most important of these is the principle that goodness and truth need each other and belong together, which is the correlative of common salt. Fixed as this is, and crystalline, the truth of life recognizes it as akin to itself, incorporates it readily into itself, and suggests everywhere to inquirers how to do good, that it must be done according to the truth. 

  The rain that soaks through the earth, receives the particles of the earth which are most ready to unite with it, the chief element in which is common salt, and carries them to the sea, in token of the readiness of the earth to unite with the water, and of its own desire to unite with the earth in fruitfulness. With the salt we season our food, to express its willingness to unite with the fluids of the body, and this willingness is to our perception savoriness. But, when received, the salt in the body excites thirst, which is like the desire of the earth for water, and represents a deficiency of truth of life. When this is excessive, life ceases; whence came the custom in ancient times of sowing with salt the cities which were doomed to desolation-representing their lack of truth of life.

Author: JOHN WORCESTER 1875