The initial difficulty of all good enterprises.
"Strait is the gate … which leadeth unto life." Dean Plumptre gives the similar figure, taken from what is known as the "Tablet of Cebes, the Disciple of Socrates:" "Seest thou not a certain small door, and a pathway before the door, in no way crowded, but few, very few, go in thereat? This is the way that leadeth to true discipline". Buckingham, the traveller among the Arabs, has a striking illustration: "Close by the sarcophagus is a curious old mosque, with a large open centre, and colonnades, or wings of three arches each, on each side. Some of the arches rest on square pillars of masonry, and others on small circular columns of basalt. One of these pillars is formed wholly of one piece of stone, including pedestal, shaft, and capital; and near it is a curious double column, the pedestals of which are in one piece, the shafts each composed of two pieces, and the two capitals with their plinths all formed out of one block. These pillars are not large, and are only distant from each other, as they stand, about a human span. They are right opposite the door of entrance into the mosque, and we were assured that it was a general belief among the Mohammedans that whoever could pass through these pillars unhurt was destined for heaven, and whoever could not might prepare either to reduce his bulk, or expect a worse fate in hell."
I. THE BEGINNING OF COMMON HANDICRAFT IS DIFFICULT. So the apprentice ever finds it. A lesson in self-discipline is the first lesson every one must learn who means to do anything worth doing. This is readily illustrated in specific instances.
II. THE BEGINNING OF ALL MENTAL ACQUIREMENT IS DIFFICULT, A strait gate is at the entrance of all science. He who will not wrestle with the perplexities of the alphabet shall learn nothing.
III. THE BEGINNING OF ALL MORAL CULTURE IS DIFFICULT. As difficult as these other things. More difficult, because the moral nature has taken a bias to self-indulgence and evil. So there is the dead weight of self-resistance to overcome. The pillars at the entrance of the temple of all true good are only a span apart. No man who will not squeeze himself, deny himself, can hope to enter in.—R.T.