Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: October 22, 2025
Messalla complains in Tacitus of the straitness of some garments in his time, and of the fashion of the benches where the orators were to declaim, that were a disadvantage to their eloquence. My French tongue is corrupted, both in the pronunciation and otherwise, by the barbarism of my country.
ANSWER. The straitness, the narrowness, must not be understood of the gate simply, but because of that cumber that some men carry with them that pretend to be going to heaven. Six cubits! What is sixteen cubits to him who would enter in here with all the world on his back?
In these days of straitness the question would naturally arise, If, when you have only to care for one hundred and thirty orphans, you are so poor, what will you do when there are three hundred, for whom you are just on the point of building a house?
Therefore, strive now for those things that will then give you entrance into the heavenly kingdom. But, II. As it is called a gate, so it is called a strait gate "Strive to enter in at the strait gate." The straitness of this gate is not to be understood carnally, but mystically.
This matter had in truth no less heavily stricken his father's soul, but he had held his peace, inasmuch as he could never bring himself to play the lord over his wife; albeit he was in other matters a strict and thorough man; nay a right stern master, who ruled the host of foresters and hewers, warders and beaters, bee-keepers and woodmen who were under him with prudence and straitness.
If any uninspired writer has been entitled to the name of Boanerges, or a son of thunder, it is the author of the following treatise. Here we have a most searching and faithful display of the straitness or exact dimensions of that all-important gate, which will not suffer many professors to pass into the kingdom of heaven, encumbered as they are with fatal errors.
So the other told him the whole story, sore concerned at what he heard and saw, and added, 'I have brought thee a present such as souls desire, and the price of thy dish of gold, that I took; for it was the cause of my becoming rich, after poverty, and of the reinstating of my dwelling-place, after desolation, and of the doing away of my trouble and straitness from me. But the poor man shook his head, groaning and weeping and lamenting, and answered, 'O man, methinks thou art mad; for this is not the fashion of a man of understanding.
Thereupon, the man who had waxed wealthy being sore concerned, told him the whole story, and added, "I have brought thee a present, such as souls desire, and the price of thy dish of gold which I took; for it was the cause of my affluence after poverty, and of the replenishment of my dwelling-place, after desolation, and of the dispersion of my trouble and straitness."
All this while my heart had the coldness of a stone upon it, and the straitness that is to be expected from the lone exercise of reason.
At the end of this time I came to a high mountain, whereunder ran the river; which when I saw, I feared for my life by reason of the straitness I had suffered in my former journey, and I would fain have stayed the raft and landed on the mountain- side; but the current overpowered me and drew it into the subterranean passage like an archway; whereupon I gave myself up for lost and said, "There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah, the Glorious, the Great!"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking