I once heard a Sunday-School superintendent explain this passage to his scholars by saying that a camel could pass through this eye of a needle--meaning the door--if he was not loaded. Therefore, and by analogy, if we cast off our load of sin outside, we can easily enter into the kingdom of heaven. Were the camel and the gate left out, this statement would be an excellent fatherly admonition. There is perhaps no gate in the celestial city large enough to admit a man with a load of sin strapped to his soul. However, the chief trouble with these explanations of the "eye-of-the-needle" passage is that they are wholly untrue. This saying is current in the East, and in all probability it was a common saying there long before the advent of Christ. But I never knew that small door in a city or a castle gate to be called the needle's eye; nor indeed the large gate to be called the needle. The name of that door, in the common speech of the country, is the "plum," and I am certain the {132} Scriptural passage makes no reference to it whatever. The Koran makes use of this expression in one of its purest classical Arabic passages. The term employed here--_sûm-el-khiat_--can mean only the sewing instrument, and nothing else. Nothing can show more clearly the genuine Oriental character of this New Testament passage and that of the Teacher who uttered it, than the intense positiveness of its thought and the unrestrained flight of its imagery. I can just hear the Master say it. Jesus' purpose was to state that it was extremely difficult "for them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God."[6] To this end he chose the biggest animal and the smallest opening known to his people and compared the impossibility of a camel passing through the eye of a needle with that of a man weighted down with earthly things becoming one with God. The Master's rebuke of the scribes and pharisees, {133} "Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat and swallow a camel,"[7] expresses a similar thought in a different form and connection. There is no need here to puzzle over the anatomical problem as to whether the throat of a Pharisee was capacious enough to gulp a camel down. The strong and agreeable Oriental flavor of this saying comes from the sharp contrast between the size of the gnat and that of the camel. So the Master employed it in order to show the glaring contradictions in the precepts and practices of the priests of his day, who tithed mint and rue, but "passed over judgment and the love of God."