Sermon Preached in Holy Trinity Cathedral By Dean Trivett at Evensong on July 4
Text:—"Enter ye in at the strait gate; " Matthew 7, 13.
for The Bible has only one way of classifying people, and that is by character. It takes no count of wealth or learning or rank, And further, the Bible knows only two classes. It divides men into good and bad, godly and ungodly, righteous and unr!
hteous. There are no other classes save these two, and in one or other of them it asserts every man must stand. The Bible knows, no such thing as neutrality: you cSnhot sit on the fence. One only needs to turn the pages of holy writ to see how sharp is the distinction. Jesus said: "He that is not with me is against me." There are no intermediate classes in the vivid picture of the last judgment in Matthew 2) nor in the story of/the ten virgins: five were wise and the rest were foolish, In this passage from our Lesson this evening, from which our text is taken, we find the same sharp anti the Christ speaks of two gates, by one or other of which men must enter: two ways, by One or other of them men must travel two ends, at one of them men must arrive, There is a wide gate. A man need not struggle to enter by it. He can drift through it, and it opens on a broad way, with room to wander hither and thither as the inclination takes him. There is no sacrifice necessary in order to enter by this gate and travel along this way. A man can carry all "his lusts and passions and sins along with him. The gate is the gate of desire, wide and easy of entrance, and the way is the way of selfishness.
When a man follows his own inclination, gives free rein to the appetites and passions of human nature, deliberately chooses the of indulgence and pleasure and sin, he is entering in by the wide gate, and the fascination of this way is i ease: but the end is destruction, Never forget that. You may di if you So desire, but the drift is down and away from God. Nothing in this world or the next is won without struggle. It is easy to scatter, but hard to gather, It is easy to tear
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.