Matthew 7:13-14, near the close of the Sermon on the Mount, delivers one of Jesus's most austere teachings: "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." The contrast is geometrically precise: a wide gate with a broad road versus a narrow gate with a narrow road, with the destination of each specified clearly.
The word "strait" in the KJV means narrow or constricted, not straight. The image is of a gate that barely admits passage, through which one must squeeze rather than stroll. The narrow road that follows requires sustained attention to stay on it; it is easy to wander off a narrow path in ways that are impossible on a broad highway. Together gate and road describe the demanding character of genuine moral and spiritual life: entry is not easy; the path is not wide; the conditions of passage are constraining.
The image deeply influenced Western moral literature. The contrast between the easy path to destruction and the difficult path to life appears in texts as diverse as the early Christian Didache (which opens with "There are two ways, one of life and one of death"), Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which is essentially a narrative dramatization of this teaching, and Dante's Divine Comedy, which begins with a pilgrim lost because he has wandered from the straight path. The two-ways motif, biblical in origin, became one of the organizing patterns of Western moral narrative.
The specific phrase "strait is the gate" received its most celebrated literary application in Andre Gide's novel La Porte Etroite (1909), translated into English as Strait Is the Gate. Gide's protagonist Alissa pursues an increasingly ascetic spiritual self-denial in the belief that the narrow way to God requires the renunciation of earthly happiness, including love. The novel is both a meditation on the Matthean text and a critique of a certain Protestant spirituality that confuses genuine moral seriousness with the rejection of embodied human joy. Gide, himself a Protestant, was writing from inside the tradition he was examining.
The novel brought the biblical phrase to the attention of twentieth-century literary culture in a new way, giving it tragic resonance that the original saying did not carry. Jesus's teaching in Matthew 7 is not a counsel of despair but an honest description of the demands of genuine moral life; Gide's novel explores what happens when the teaching is taken to a psychologically destructive extreme.
In everyday English, "strait is the gate" and "straight and narrow" (a related phrase) describe any demanding but genuine path, as opposed to easier alternatives that lead somewhere worse. The phrases are used in discussions of professional ethics, moral philosophy, and personal integrity. The narrow way metaphor remains apt for describing any discipline that requires sustained attention and effort, where the easy default is to take the wide road that requires no special attention or direction.
The theological debate about what exactly the narrow gate requires has continued throughout Christian history. Does it refer to baptism, doctrinal orthodoxy, moral rigor, or spiritual discipline? The Sermon on the Mount's answer, available in the surrounding context, suggests that the narrow gate is entered through genuine interior transformation (the Beatitudes), not merely external compliance. But the phrase, abstracted from that context, has supported both rigorous and gentle interpretations across the centuries of its use.
The phrase entered American religious culture particularly powerfully through the Puritan tradition, which emphasized the demanding character of genuine conversion and sanctification. The Puritans preached against what they called "easy believism," the idea that merely professing belief without evidence of genuine transformation was sufficient for salvation. The strait gate was a recurring image for the genuine difficulty of authentic Christian life as opposed to its social imitation.
This theological emphasis, though it could degenerate into harsh scrupulosity, also produced the distinctive Puritan intensity of self-examination that is visible in spiritual diaries and autobiographies from the seventeenth century onward. The willingness to ask hard questions about one's own spiritual condition, to refuse comfortable self-assessment, to measure practice against the demanding standard of the Sermon on the Mount: all of these are traces of the strait-gate theology in action. The phrase thus represents not merely a metaphor but a spiritual practice of self-confrontation that shaped a significant portion of English and American religious culture.
In contemporary usage, "the straight and narrow" (a conflation of strait gate and narrow way) describes any demanding but legitimate path of conduct. The phrase appears in discussions of professional ethics, legal compliance, and personal integrity. "Staying on the straight and narrow" describes adherence to demanding standards in the face of temptations to cut corners or take easier routes. The phrase has lost its explicitly eschatological dimension, the contrast between the path to life and the path to destruction, but retains the essential structure: the right path is more demanding and less crowded than the alternatives.