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Updated: June 16, 2025
The soul that is misunderstood is most often the one that has made the least effort to gain some knowledge of self. The feeblest ideal, the one that is narrowest, straitest, most often will thrive on deception and fear, on exaction and petty contempt. We dread above all lest any should slight, or pass by unnoticed, the virtues and thoughts, the spiritual beauty, that exist only in our imagination.
Although born and reared up in the straitest sect of some Scottish denomination, about which I am unable to particularise beyond the fact that they regarded the use of harmoniums in churches as "the worship of men's feet," he betrayed a surprising knowledge of Anglican ritual and stage effect.
But these were of "the most straitest sect" of the Puritans, and it was contrary to their consciences to do any manner of carnal work on the Sabbath day, and in their estimation this was exceedingly carnal work, and they kept their faces set as if they would go to the synagogue.
So they both went thither and found naught to affright them; whereupon the water fowl began repeating, "And haply whenas strait descends on lot of generous youth * Right sore, with Allah only lies his issue from annoy: He's straitened, but full oft when rings and meshes straitest clip, * He 'scapes his strait and joyance finds, albe I see no joy."
But if fear was new-born in the hearts of the Unwise Men, the black man was born in a house of fear; to him poverty of the ugliest and straitest type was father, mother, and blood-brother. He was slipping stealthily northward to escape hunger and insult, the hand of oppression, and the shadow of death.
At the beginning you see a brilliant young Pharisee, Gamaliel's promising pupil, advanced above many who were his equals in his own religion, as he says himself; living after its straitest sect, and eager to have the smallest part in what seemed to him the righteous slaying of one of the followers of the blaspheming Nazarene. At the end he was himself one of these followers.
Yet even on the straitest view, we can make some steps towards comprehension of our own superior thoughts. For it is an incredible and most bewildering fact that a man, through life, is on variable terms with himself; he is aware of tiffs and reconciliations; the intimacy is at times almost suspended, at times it is renewed again with joy.
Tertullian, among other Jewish rites and customs, such as feasts, sabbaths, fasts, and unleavened bread, mentions "orationes literales," that is, prayers by the river-side. "After the most straitest sect of our religion, I lived a Pharisee." Joseph. de Bell. lib. i. c. 5, sect. 2.
The doctor was silent. "I doubt not you spoke in a burst of indignation; but it seems to me the indignation of a man unaccustomed to ponder the things concerning which he expresses such a positive conviction." "You are wrong there," returned Faber; "for I was brought up in the straitest sect of the Pharisees, and know what I am saying."
And again, writing of him as he was at a later date, the same critic gives this estimate of his old fellow-student's mental calibre: "I can name one former student of Sir William Hamilton's, now a minister in what would be accounted in England one of the straitest sects of Scottish Puritanism, and who has consecrated to the duties of that calling a mind among the noblest I have known and the most learned in pure philosophy.
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