THE WALLS OF ST. ANTIPAS FALL AT THE THIRD BLAST
On that dreaded morning a few weeks later, when the young minister faced
a thronged St. Antipas at eleven o'clock service, his wife looked up at
him from Aunt Bell's side in a pew well forward--the pew of Cyrus
Browett--looked up at him in trembling, loving wonder. Then a little
tender half-smile of perfect faith went dreaming along her just-parted
lips. Let the many prototypes of Dives in St. Antipas--she could see the
relentless profile of their chief at her right--be offended by his
rugged speech: he should find atoning comfort in her new love. Like
Luther, he must stand there to say out the soul of him, and she was
prostrate before his brave greatness.
When, at last, he came to read the biting verses of the parable, her
heart beat as if it would be out to him, her face paled and hardened
with the strain of his ordeal.
"And it came to pass that the beggar died and was carried by
the angels into Abraham's bosom; the rich man also died and
was buried.
"And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and
seeth Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom.
"And he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me and
send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water
and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.'
"But Abraham said, 'Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime
receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things;
but now he is comforted and thou art tormented.'"
The sermon began. Unflinchingly the preacher pointed out that Dives,
apparently, lay in hell for no other reason than that he had been a rich
man; no sin was imputed to him; not even unbelief; he had not only
transgressed no law, but was doubtless a respectable, God-fearing man of
irreproachable morals--sent to hell for his wealth.
And Lazarus appeared to have won heaven merely by reason of his poverty.
No virtue, no active good conduct, was accredited to him.
Reading with the eye of common understanding, Jesus taught that the
rich merited eternal torment by reason of their riches, and the poor
merited eternal life by reason of their poverty, a belief that one
might hear declared even to-day. Nor was this view attested solely by
this parable. Jesus railed constantly at those in high places, at the
rich and at lawyers, and the chief priests and elders and those in
authority--declaring that he had been sent, not to them, but to the
poor who needed a physician.
But was there not a seeming inconsistency here in the teachings of the
Master? If the poor achieved heaven automatically by their mere poverty,
_why were they still needing a physician?_ Under that view, why were not
the rich those who needed a physician--according to the literal words of
Jesus?
Up to the close of this passage the orator's manner had been one of
glacial severity--of a sternness apparently checked by rare self-control
from breaking into a denunciation of the modern Dives. Then all was
changed. His face softened and lighted; the broad shoulders seemed to
relax from their uncompromising squareness; he stood more easily upon
his feet; he glowed with a certain encouraging companionableness.
Was that, indeed, the teaching of Jesus--as if in New York to-day he
might say, "I have come to Third Avenue rather than to Fifth?" Can this
crudely literal reading of his words prevail? Does it not carry its own
refutation--the extreme absurdity of supposing that Jesus would come to
the squalid Jews of the East Side and denounce the better elements that
maintain a church like St. Antipas?
The fallacy were easily probed. A modern intelligence can scarcely
prefigure heaven or hell as a reward or punishment for mere carnal
comfort or discomfort--as many literal-minded persons believe that
Jesus taught. The Son of Man was too subtle a philosopher to teach that
a rich man is lost by his wealth and a poor man saved by his poverty,
though primitive minds took this to be his meaning. Some primitive minds
still believe this--witness the frequent attempts to read a literal
meaning into certain other words of Jesus: the command, for example,
that a man should give up his cloak also, if he be sued for his coat.
Little acumen is required to see that no society could protect itself
against the depredations of the lawless under such a system of
non-resistance; and we may be sure that Jesus had no intention of
tearing down the social structure or destroying vested rights. Those who
demand a literal construction of the parable of Dives and Lazarus must
look for it in the Bowery melodrama, wherein the wealthy only are
vicious and poverty alone is virtuous.
We have only to consider the rawness of this conception to perceive that
Jesus is not to be taken literally.
Who, then, is the rich man and who the poor--who is the Dives and who
the Lazarus of this intensely dramatic parable?
Dives is but the type of the spiritually rich man who has not charity
for his spiritually poor brother; of the man rich in faith who will not
trouble to counsel the doubting; of the one rich in humility who will
yet not seek to save his neighbour from arrogance; of him rich in
charity who indifferently views his uncharitable brethren; of the man
rich in hope who will not strive to make hopeful the despairing; of the
one rich in graces of the Holy Ghost who will not seek to reclaim the
unsanctified beggar at his gate.
And who is Lazarus but a type of the aspiring--the soul-hungry, whether
he be a millionaire or a poor clerk--the determined seeker whose eye is
single and whose whole body is full of light? In this view, surely more
creditable to the intellect of our Saviour, mere material wealth ceases
to signify; the Dives of spiritual reality may be the actual beggar rich
in faith yet indifferent to the soul-hunger of the faithless; while poor
Lazarus may be the millionaire, thirsting, hungering, aspiring, day
after day, for crumbs of spiritual comfort that the beggar, out of the
abundance of his faith, would never miss.
Christianity has suffered much from our failure to give the Saviour due
credit for subtlety. So far as money--mere wealth--is a soul-factor at
all, it must be held to increase rather than to diminish its possessor's
chances of salvation, but not in merely providing the refinements of
culture and the elegances of modern luxury and good taste, important
though these are to the spirit's growth. The true value of wealth to the
soul--a value difficult to over-estimate--is that it provides
opportunity for, and encourages the cultivation of, that virtue which is
"the greatest of all these"; that virtue which "suffereth long and is
kind; which vaunteth not itself and is not puffed up"--Charity, in
short. While not denying the simple joys of penury, nor forgetting the
Saviour's promises to the poor and meek and lowly, it is still easy to
understand that charity is less likely to be a vigorous soul-growth in a
poor man than in a rich. The poor man may possess it as a germ, a seed;
but the rich man is, through superior prowess in the struggle for
existence, in a position to cultivate this virtue; and who will say that
he has not cultivated it? Certainly no one acquainted with the efforts
of our wealthy men to uplift the worthy poor. A certain modern
sentimentality demands that poverty be abolished--ignoring those
pregnant words of Jesus--"the poor ye have _always_ with
you"--forgetting, indeed, that human society is composed of unequal
parts, even as the human body; that equality exists among the social
members only in this: that all men have their origin in God the Creator,
have sinned in Adam, and have been, by the sacrificial blood of God's
only begotten Son, born of the Virgin Mary, equally redeemed into
eternal life, if they will but accept Christ as their only true
Saviour;--forgetting indeed that to abolish poverty would at once
prevent all manifestations of human nature's most beauteous trait and
virtue--Charity.
Present echoes from the business world indicate that the poor man
to-day, with his vicious discontent, his preposterous hopes of
trades-unionism, and his impracticable and very _un-Christian_ dreams of
an industrial millennium, is the true and veritable Dives, rich in
arrogance and poor in that charity of judgment which the millionaire has
so abundantly shown himself to possess.
The remedy was for the world to come up higher. Standing upon one of the
grand old peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the speaker had once witnessed a
scene in the valley below which, for beauty of illustration of the
thought in hand, the world could not surpass. He told his hearers what
the scene was. And he besought them to come up to the rock of Charity
and mingle in the blue serene. Charity--a tear dropped on the world's
cold cheek of intolerance to make it burn forever! Or it was the grand
motor-power which, like a giant engine, has rolled the car of
civilisation out from the maze of antiquity into the light of the
present day where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits
of living genius, then to speed on to that hoped-for golden era when
truth shall rise as a new and blazing star to light the splendid
pageantry of earth, bound together in one law of universal brotherhood,
independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence. Charity
indeed was what Voltaire meant to inculcate when he declared: "Atheism
and fanaticism are the two poles of a universe of confusion and horror.
The narrow zone of virtue is between these two. March with a firm step
in that path; believe in a good God and do good."
The peroration was beautifully simple, thrilling the vast throng with a
sudden deeper conviction of the speaker's earnestness: "_Charity!_ Oh,
of all the flowers that have swung their golden censers in the parterre
of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of charity.
Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be
crushed before their fragrance becomes perceptible; but _this_ flower at
early morn, at burning noon and when the dew of eve is on the flowers,
has coursed its way down the garden walk, out through the deep, dark
dell, over the burning plain, and up the mountain side--_up_, ever UP it
rises into the beautiful blue--up along the cloudy corridors of the day,
up along the misty pathway to the skies till it touches the beautiful
shore and mingles with the breath of angels."
Hardly was there a dissenting voice in all St. Antipas that Sabbath upon
the proposal that this powerful young preacher be called to its pulpit.
The few who warily suggested that he might be too visionary, not
sufficiently in touch with the present day, were quieted the following
Sabbath by a very different sermon on certain flaws in the fashionable
drama.
The one and only possible immorality in this world, contended the
speaker, was untruth. A sermon was as immoral as any stage play if the
soul of it was not Truth; and a stage play became as moral as a sermon
if its soul was truth. The special form of untruth he attacked was what
he styled "the drama of the glorified wanton." Warmly and ably did he
denounce the pernicious effect of those plays, that take the wanton for
a heroine and sentimentalise her into a morbid attractiveness. The stage
should show life, and the wanton, being of life, might be portrayed; but
let it be with ruthless fidelity. She must not be falsified into a
creature of fine sensibilities and lofty emotions--a thing of dangerous
plausibility to the innocent.
The last doubter succumbed on the third Sabbath, when he preached from
the warning of Jesus that many would come after him, performing in his
name wonders that might deceive, were it possible, even the very elect.
The sermon likened this generation to the people Paul found in Athens,
running curiously after any new god; after Christian Science--which he
took the liberty of remarking was neither Christian nor scientific--or
mental science, spiritism, theosophy, clairvoyance, all black arts,
straying from the fold of truth into outer darkness--forgetting that
"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that
whosoever believed therein might not perish, but have everlasting life."
As this was the sole means of salvation that God had provided, the time
was, obviously, one fraught with vital interest to every thinking man.
As a sagacious member of the Board of Trustees remarked, it would hardly
have been possible to preach three sermons better calculated, each in
its way, to win the approval of St. Antipas.
The call came and was accepted after the signs of due and prayerful
consideration. But as for Nancy, she had left off certain of her
wonderings forever.