The gate is in view here merely as a means of access to the road, and
the metaphor simply comes to this, that it is more difficult to be a
Christian man than not to be one, and therefore you ought to be one.
Now, what makes a Christian? We do not need to go further than this
Sermon on the Mount for answer. The two first of our Lord's Beatitudes,
as they are called, are 'Blessed are the poor in spirit,' and 'Blessed
are they that mourn.' These two carry the conditions of entrance on the
Christian life. There must be consciousness of our own emptiness,
weakness, and need; there must be penitent recognition of our own
ill-desert and lamentation over that. These two things, the
consciousness of emptiness, and the sorrow for sin, make--I was going to
say--the two door-posts of the narrow gate through which a man has to
press. It is too narrow for any of his dignities or honours. A camel
cannot go through the eye of a needle, not only because of its own bulk,
but because of the burdens which flap on either side of it, and catch
against the jambs. All my self-confidence, and reputation, and
righteousness, will be rubbed off when I try to press through that
narrow aperture. You may find on a lonely moor low, contracted openings
that lead into tortuous passages--the approaches to some of the ancient
'Picts' houses,' where a feeble folk dwelt, and secured themselves from
their enemies. The only way to get into them is to go down upon your
knees; and the only way to get into this road--the way of
righteousness--is by taking the same attitude. No man can enter
unless--like that German Emperor whom a Pope kept standing in the snow
for three days outside the gate of Canossa--he is stripped of
everything, down to the hair-shirt of penitence. And that is not easy.
Naaman wanted to be healed as a great man in the court of Damascus. He
had to strip himself of his offices, and dignities, and pride, and to
come down to the level of any other leper. You and I, dear brother, have
to go through the same process of stripping ourselves of all the
adventitious accretions that have clung to us, and to know ourselves
naked and helpless, before we can pass through the gate.
Further, we have to go in one by one. Two cannot pass the turnstile at
the same time. We have to enter singly, as we shall have to pass through
the other 'dark gates, across the wild which no man knows,' at the end
of life.
Because it is strait, it is a great deal easier to stop outside, as so
many of those to whom I speak are doing. For that, you have nothing to
do but to drift and let things drift. No decision nor effort is needed;
no coming out of yourselves. It is all as easy as it is for a wild
animal to enter in between the broadly extending palisades that converge
as they come nearer the trap, so that the creature is snared before he
knows. The gate is wide: that is the sure condemnation of it. It is
always easy to begin bad and unworthy things, of all sorts. And there is
nothing easier than to keep in the negative position which so many of my
audience, I fear me, are in, of not being a Christian.
But, on the other side, it is not so hard as it looks to go in, and it
is not so easy as it seems to stop out. For there are two men in every
man--a better and a worse; and what pleases the one disgusts the other.
The choice which each of us has to make is whether we shall do the
things that are easiest to our worst self, or those that are easiest to
our best self. For in either case there will be difficulties; in either
case there will be antagonisms.
But it is good for us to make the effort, apart altogether from the end.
If there were no life eternal at the far end of the road which at this
end has the narrow gate, it would contribute to all that is noblest and
best in our characters, and to the repression of all that is ignoble and
worst, that we should take that lowly position which Christ requires,
and by the heroism of a self-abandoning faith, fling ourselves into His
arms.
Remember, too, that the strait gate, by reason of its very straitness,
is in the noblest sense wide. If there were anything else required of a
man than simply self-distrust and reliance on Jesus Christ, then this
great Gospel that I am feebly trying to preach would be a more
sectional and narrower thing than it is. But its glory is that it
requires nothing which any man is unable to bring, that it has no
invitation for sections, classes, grades of culture or intelligence or
morality, but that in its great cosmopolitanism and universality it
comes to every man; because it treats all as on one level, and requires
from each only what all can bring--knowledge of themselves as sinners,
and humble trust in Jesus Christ as a Saviour. It is narrow because
there is no room for sin or self-righteousness to go in; it is wide as
the world, and, like the capacious portals of some vast cathedral, ample
enough to receive without hustling, and to accommodate without
inconvenience, every soul of man.
II. Notice the contrast of the two roads, which, in like manner, points
the exhortation to choose the better.
The one is broad; the other is narrow. Which, being turned into plain
English, is just this--that the Christian course has limitations which
do not hamper the godless man; and that on the path of godlessness or
Christlessness there is a deceptive appearance of freedom and
independence which attracts many.
'Narrow is the road.' Yes, if you are to be a Christian, you must have
your whole life concentrated on, and consecrated to, one thing; and,
just as the vagrant rays of sunshine have to be collected into a focus
before they burn, so the wandering manifoldnesses of our aims and
purposes have all to be brought to a point, 'This one thing I do,' and
whatsoever we do we have to do it as in God, and for God, and by God,
and with God. Therefore the road is narrow because, being directed to
one aim, it has to exclude great tracts on either side, in which people
that have a less absorbing and lofty purpose wander and expatiate at
will. As on some narrow path in Eastern lands, with high, prickly-pear
hedges on either side, and vineyards stretching beyond them, with
luscious grapes in abundance, a traveller has to keep on the road,
within the prickly fences, dusty though it may be, and though his
thirsty lips may be cracking.
I remember once going to that strange island-fortress off the Normandy
coast, which stands on an isolated rock in the midst of a wide bay. One
narrow causeway leads across the sands. Does a traveller complain of
having to keep it? It is safety and life, for on either side stretches
the tremulous sand, on which, if a foot is planted, the pedestrian is
engulfed. So the narrow way on which we have to journey is a highway
cast up, on which no evil will befall us, while on each hand away out
to the horizon lie the treacherous quicksands. Narrowness is sometimes
safety. If the road is narrow it is the better guide, and they who
travel along it travel safely. Restrictions and limitations are of the
essence of all nobleness and virtue. 'So did not I because of the fear
of the Lord.'
Set side by side with that the competing path. Wide? Yes! 'Do as you
like'--that is sufficiently wide. And even where that gospel of the
animal has not become the guide to a man, there are many occupations,
pursuits, recreations which men who lack the supreme concentration and
consecration that come through over mastering love to Jesus Christ who
has redeemed them, may legitimately in their own estimation do, but
which no Christian man should do.
But, as I said before about the gates, it is not so easy as it looks to
walk the broad road, nor so hard as it seems to tread the narrow one.
For 'her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace';
and, on the other hand, licentiousness and liberty are not the same
thing, and true freedom is not to do as you like, but to like to do as
you ought. Besides, the path which looks attractive, and tempts to the
indulgence of many appetites and habits which a Christian man must
rigidly subdue, does not continue so attractive. Earthly pleasures have
a strange knack of losing their charm, and, at the same time, increasing
their hold, with familiarity. Many a man who has plunged into some kind
of dissipation because of the titillation of his senses which he found
in it, discovers that the titillation diminishes and the tyranny grows;
and that when he thought that he had bought a joy, he has sold himself
slave to a master.
So, dear friends, and especially you young people, let me beseech you
to be suspicious of courses of conduct which come to you with the
whisper, 'pleasant, sweet.' If you have two things before you, one of
which is easy and the other hard, ninety times out of a hundred it will
be safe for you to choose the hard one, and the odd ten times it will be
at least as well for you to choose it. 'Thus we travel to the stars.' As
one of our poets has it, 'the path of duty is the way of glory,' and
those that 'scorn delights and live laborious days,' and listen not to
the voices that say 'Come and enjoy this,' but to the sterner voice that
says 'Come and bear this'--these will
'Find the stubborn thistles bursting
Into glossy purples that outredden
All voluptuous garden roses.'
So, because the road is narrow, therefore choose it. Because the other
path is wide, I beseech you to avoid it.