“…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. Nearly all 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 undergird 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 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 farthest gone in sin, for the murderer standing on the drop of the gallows, for Rosenzweig, 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 that 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.” — Thomas De Witt Talmage, “Grace in Crystals,” in Old Wells Dug Out: Being a Third Series of Sermons (1874, 1886), pp. 79-80