o 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 cu