A TREATISE EVEN MORE RELEVANT NEARLY 350 YEARS LATER The Strait Gate is a treatise written by Puritan author, John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim's Progress. This treatise was originally published in 1676 with the purpose of the wickedness prevalent among many professing believers in Bunyan's day. One of the issues arose from the general laxity in the preaching the gospel; and near kin to it, was the ease with which someone could make a confession of faith- having no conviction of sin, nor fruit of repentance, and no holiness of living. John Bunyan took the matter to task. Free from his incarceration at the Bedford Jail for two years (after 12 years in prison), Mr. Bunyan exhorted his readers to embrace a pure gospel, a Biblical gospel. Bunyan viewed the Person and work of Jesus Christ the mainspring from which every aspect of acceptable Christianity was produced, be it doctrinal, dutiful or devotional. "Good works must flow from faith, or not at all," wrote John Bunyan in his 1663 treatise, Christian Behaviour (first published in 1674). FROM GEORGE OFFER IN 1862 In his "Editor's Advertisement," prelude to this treatise in The Complete Works of John Bunyan, George Offor wrote, "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. Still 'it is no little pinching wicket, but wide enough for all the truly gracious and sincere lovers of Jesus Christ; while it is so strait, that no others can by any means enter in.' This is a subject calculated to rouse and stimulate all genuine professors to solemn inquiry; and it was peculiarly intended to dart at, and fix convictions upon, the multitudes of hypocritical professors who abounded in Bunyan's time, especially under the reigns of the later Stuarts." More than 150 years since Mr. Offor wrote his advertisement, and nearly 350 years since Mr. Bunyan wrote this treatise, error has multiplied and, worse, been magnified to nearly culminate with a mishmash of every error and corruption of the gospel since the birth of the church in the first century. With Mr. Bunyan's treatise, The Strait Gate, the discerning believer will agree that the Bedford tinker-turned-preacher's exhortation to receive knowledge of t