Note 3 — LETTER LIX.

This, so far as the Arts are concerned, is ‘entering in at the Strait gate,’ of which entrance, and its porter’s lodge, you will find farther account given in my fourth morning in Florence, which I should like you to read, as a preparation for the work more explicitly now to be directed under St. George. The immediate gist of it, for those who do not care to read of Florence, I must be irksome enough again to give here; namely, that the word Strait, applied to the entrance into Life, and the word Narrow, applied to the road of Life, do not mean that the road is so fenced that few can travel it, however much they wish, (like the entrance to the pit of a theatre,)3 but that, for each person, it is at first so stringent, so difficult, and so dull, being between close hedges, that few will enter it, though all may. In a second sense, and an equally vital one, it is not merely a Strait, or narrow, but a straight, or right road; only, in this rightness of it, not at all traced by hedges, wall, or telegraph wire, or even marked by posts higher than winter’s snow; but, on the contrary, often difficult to trace among morasses and mounds of desert, even by skilful sight; and by blind persons, entirely untenable, unless by help of a guide, director, rector, or rex: which you may conjecture to be the reason why, when St Paul’s eyes were to be opened, out of the darkness which meant only the consciousness of utter mistake, to seeing what way he should go, his director was ordered to come to him in the “street which is called Straight.”