We stand in one of the finest private houses of the olden time. Every
room is luxurious. The floor--made of stones, gypsum, coal and chalk,
pounded together--is hard and beautiful. From the roof, surrounded by a
balustrade, you take in all the beauty of the landscape.
The porch is cool and refreshing, where sit the people who have come in
to look at the building, and are waiting for the usher. In this place you
hear the crystal plash of the fountains.
The windows, reaching to the floor and adorned, are quiet places to
lounge in; and we sit here, listening to the stamp of the horses in the
princely stables.
Venison and partridge, delicate morsels of fatted calf, and honey, figs,
dates, pomegranates and fish that only two hours ago glided in the
lake, and bowls of fine sherbet from Egypt--these make up the feast,
accompanied with riddles and jests that evoke roaring laughter, with
occasional outbursts of music, in which harps thrum and cymbals clap and
shepherd’s pipe whistles.
What a place to sit in!
The lord of the place, in dress that changes with every whim, lies on a
lounge, stupid from stuffed digestion. His linen is so fine, I wonder who
washed it and who ironed it. His jewels are the brightest, his purple the
rarest.
Let him lie perfectly quiet a moment, until we take his photograph. Here
we have it:
“A certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and
fared sumptuously every day.”
How accurate the picture! You can see every pleat in the linen and every
wrinkle in the shirt. What more could that man have? My lord, be happy!
After a while he leans over the balustrade, and says to a friend in
shining apparel:
“Look at that fellow--lying at my gate! I wonder why the porter allows
him to lie there. How disgusting! But our dogs will be let out of the
kennel very soon, and will clear him out.”
Yes, they bound toward him. “Take hold of him!” cries the rich man from
the balustrade.
The dogs go at the beggar with terrible bark; then take lower growling;
then stop to yawn; and at the coaxing tone of the poor wretch, they frisk
about him, and put their soft, healing tongues to his ulcers, driving off
the flies and relieving the insufferable itch and sting of wounds which
could not afford salve or bandage.
Lazarus has friends at last. They will for a while keep off the insults
of the street, and will defend their patient. That man is far from
friendless who has a good dog to stand by him. Dogs are often not so mean
as are their masters. They will not be allowed to enter into Heaven, but
may they not be allowed to lie down at the gate? John says of the door of
Heaven: “Without are dogs.”
But what is the matter with that beggar? He lies over, now, with his face
exposed to the sun. Lazarus, get up! He responds not. Poor fellow, he is
dead!
Two men appointed by the town come to carry him out to the fields. They
dig a hole, drop him in and cover him up. People say: “One more nuisance
got rid of.”
Aha! That is not Lazarus whom they buried; they buried only his sores.
Yonder goes Lazarus--an angel on his right hand, an angel on his left,
carrying him up the steep of Heaven--talking, praising, rejoicing. Good
old Abraham stands at the gate, and throws his arms around the new comer.
Now Lazarus has his own fine house, and his own robes, and his own
banquet, and his own chariot; and that poor and sickly carcass of his,
that the overseers of the town dumped in the potter’s field, will come
up at the call of the archangel--straight, pure and healthy--corruption
having become incorruption.
Now, we will go back a minute to the fine Oriental house that we spoke
of. The lord of the place has been receiving visitors today, as the
doorkeeper introduced them.
After a while there is a visitor who waits not for the porter to open
the gate, nor for the doorkeeper to introduce him. Who is it coming? Stop
him there at the door! How dare he come in unheralded?
He walks into the room, and the lord cries out, with terror-stricken face:
“This is Death! Away with him!”
There is a hard thump on the floor. Is it a pitcher that has fallen? An
ottoman upset? No. Dives has fallen. Dives is dead.
The excitement in town is great. The grooms rush from the barns to see.
All the great folk of the neighborhood, who used to sit at his dinners,
come in. The grocer from whom he got his spices, the butcher from whom he
got his meats and the clothier from whom he got his garments come to find
out all about it.
The day of burial has arrived. Dives is carried down out of his splendid
room, and through the porch into the street. The undertaker will
make a big job of it, for there is plenty to pay. There will be high
eulogies of him pronounced, although the Bible represents him as chiefly
distinguished for his enormous appetite and his fine shirt.
The long procession moves on, amid the accustomed weeping and howling
of Oriental obsequies. The sepulcher is reached. Six persons, carrying
the body, go carefully down the steps leading to the door of the dead.
The weight of the body on those ahead is heavy, and they hold back. The
relics are left in the sepulcher, and the people return.
But Dives is not buried there.
That which they buried is only the shell in which he lived. Dives is
down yonder in a deeper grave. He who had all the wine he could drink
asks for a plainer beverage. He wants water. He does not ask for a
cupful, nor even for a teaspoonful, but “just one drop,” and he can not
get it.
He looks up and sees Lazarus, the very man whom he set his dogs on, and
wants him to put his finger into water and let him lick it off.
Once Lazarus wanted just the crumbs from Dives’ feast; now Dives wants
just a drop from Lazarus’ banquet. Poor as poor can be! He has eaten his
last quail’s wing. He has broken the rind of his last pomegranate. Dives
the lord has become Dives the pauper. The dogs of remorse and despair
come not with healing tongue to lick, but with relentless muzzle to tear.
Now Dives sits at the gate in everlasting beggary, while Lazarus, amid
the festivities of Heaven, fares sumptuously every day.
You see that this parable takes in the distant future, and speaks as
though the resurrection were passed and the body of Lazarus had already
joined his spirit, and so I treat it.
Well, you see a man may be beggared for this life, but be a prince
in eternity. A cluster of old rags was the entire property of
Lazarus. His bare feet and his ulcered legs were an invitation to
the brutes; his food the broken victuals that were pitched out by
the house-keeper--half-chewed crusts, rinds, peelings, bones and
gristle--about the last creature out of which to make a prince--yet for
eighteen hundred years he has been one of the millionaires of Heaven. No
more waiting for crumbs. He sits at the same table with the kings of
eternity, himself one of them. What were the forty years of his poverty
compared with the long ages of his royalty?
Let all the Christian poor be comforted. Your good days will be after a
while. Stand it a little longer, and you will be all right. God has a
place for you among the principalities. Do not be afraid of the dogs of
distress, for they will not bite; they will help to heal. Your poverty
may sometimes have led you to doubt whether you will have a decent
funeral. You shall have grander obsequies than many a man who is carried
out by a procession of governors and senators. The pall-bearers will be
the angels that carried Lazarus into Abraham’s bosom. The surveyors have
been busy. Your eternal possessions have been already laid out by God’s
surveyors, and the stake that bounds the property on this side is driven
into the top of your grave, and all beyond is yours.
You can afford to wear poor clothes now, when for you in the upper
wardrobes is folded up the royal purple. You can afford to have coarse
food here, when your bread is to be made from the finest wheat of the
eternal harvests. Cheer up! Weeping may endure for a night, but joy
cometh in the morning.
See, also, that a man may have every comfort and luxury here, and yet
come to a wretched future. It is no sin to be rich. It is a sin not to
be rich, if we can be rich honestly. I wish I had five hundred thousand
dollars--I suppose I might as well make it a million. I see so much
suffering and trial every day that I say, again and again, I wish I had
the money to relieve it.
But alas for the man who has nothing but money! Dives’ house had a front
door and a back door, and they both opened into eternity. Sixty seconds
after Dives was gone, of what use were his horses? He could not ride
them. Of what use were his rich viands? He could not open his clenched
teeth to eat them. Of what use were his fine linen shirts, when he could
not wear them?
The poorest man who stood along the road, watching the funeral procession
of Dives, owned more of this world than did the dead gormandizer. The
future world was all the darker because of the brightness of this.
That wife of a drunken husband, if she does wrong and loses her soul,
will not find it so intolerable in hell as others, for she has been in
hell ever since she was married, and is partially used to it.
But this rich man, Dives, had every thing once--now nothing. He once had
the best wine; now he can not get water. He had, like other affluent
persons of the East, slaves to fan him when he was hot; now he is being
consumed. He can afford no covering so good as the old patches that once
fluttered about Lazarus as he went walking in the wind.
Who among my hearers will take Dives’ fine house, costly plate, dazzling
equipage and kennel of blooded dogs, if his eternity must be thrown in
with it?