Lazarus and Dives
“There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day; and there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. 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.” — Luke xvi., 19-25.
WE stand in one of the finest private houses of old¬ en time. Every room is luxurious. The floor, made of stones, gypsum, coal, and chalk, pounded to¬ gether, is hard and beautiful. From the roof, surrounded by a balustrade, you take in all the beauty of the land¬ scape. 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 blanketed horses in the princely stables. Venison and partridge, delicate morsels of fatted calf, and honey, and figs, and dates, and pomegranates, and fish that only two hours ago glided in the lake, and bowls of sherbet from Egypt, 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. Ilis jewels the brightest, his purple the rarest. Let him lie perfectly quiet a moment until we take his photograph. Here wTe 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 wTrinkle in the skirt. What more could that man have? My lord, be happy! After a while he leans over the balus¬ trade, and says to a friend in shining apparel, “Look at that fellow lying down at my gate. I wonder wdiy 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 wdiile keep off the insults of the street, and 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 their masters.
They will not be allowed to enter heaven, but may they not be allowed to lie down at the gate? for 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 of the town come to carry him out to the fields. They dig a hole, drop him in, and cover him up. The people say, “One more nuisance got rid of!” Aha! that is not Lazarus that they buried. It was only his sores. Yonder goes Lazarus, an angel on his right hand, an angel on the left, carrying him up the steep of heaven — talking, praising, rejoicing. Good old Abraham stands at the gate, and throws his arms around the newcomer. How Lazarus has his own fine house, and his own robes, and his own banquet, and his own chariot, and that poor, sickly carcass of his that the overseers of the town dump¬ ed in the potter’s field will come up at the call of the archangel, straight, and pure, and healthy, corruption having become incorruption.
How we will go back a minute to the fine Oriental house that we spoke of. The lord of the place has been receiving visitors to-day as the doorkeeper introduced them. After a while there is a visitor who waits not for the porter to open the gate, or for the doorkeeper to introduce him. Who is if coming? Stop him there at th’e door! How dare he come in unheralded! He walks into the room, and the lord cries, with terror-struck face, “This is >Death. Away with him /” There is a hard thump on the floor. Is it a pitcher which has fallen, or an ottoman which has upset? Ho. Dives has fallen. Dives is dead!
The excitement in town is great. The grooms rush from the barn to see. All the great folks 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 the meat, and the clothier from whom he got the garments, come to find out all about it.
The day of burial has arrived. He 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 text 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 sepulchre is reached. Six persons carrying the body go care¬ fully 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 sepulchre, and the people return. But Dives is not buried there. That which is 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, or 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 in water and let him lick it off. Once Lazarus wanted just the crumbs from Dives’s feast; now Dives wants just a drop from Lazarus’s banquet. Poor as poor can be. He has eaten the last quail’s wing. He has broken the rind of the 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. Llis bare feet and ulcered legs were an invitation to the brutes — his food the broken victuals that were pitched out by the housekeeper, halfchewed crusts, rinds, peelings, bones, gristle — about the last creature out of which to make a prince, yet for eight¬ een 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: 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 honestly. I wish I had five hundred thousand dollars — 1 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’s house had a front door and a back door, and they both opened into eternity. Sixty seconds after Dives was gone, of what use his horses? he could not ride them; of what use his rich viands? he could not open his clenched teeth to eat them; of what use 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 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 man of the text had every thing once, now nothing. He 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 walked in the wind. Who here will take Dives’s fine house, and costly plate, and dazzling equipage, and kennel of blooded dogs, if his eternity must be thrown in with it?
Men! men! who have nothing but worldly success as your goal, consider. After you get your elegant house, or your influential business firm, will you be fitted out for eternity? Breakfasting at half past seven in the morning, and dying at ten, where will you dine? Taking tea at six o’clock, and dying at eleven, where will you sleep? The Indian who for a string of beads sells as much territory as will make a state, is wise compared with a man wTho for the trinkets of earth barters heaven. “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
See farther in the text the extreme suffering of the finally exiled. It has been a wonder to me why Universalists come to my church, not merely temporarily, but that they hold sittings here, and come to all our services, and they are among my best friends. I hold in my hand a letter which makes it plain. The writer of it evident¬ ly believes there is no future place of punishment. He says in his letter: “I don’t believe that which you preach, but I am certain you believe it. I prefer to hear you ex¬ pound the Bible, because you do not ignore hell; for if the foundation of your faith is true, hell is just as certain as Paradise, and has just as much of a locality.” How I understand it. Men want us to be frank in the declaration of our beliefs. All the world knows that the leading denominations in this day believe that there is a hell as certainly as that there is a heaven. Why, then, slur over the fact, or try to hide it, or declare it only with slight emphasis? I am an old fogy in my interpretation of the Bible. I have not so much intellect as those men who know how to make an eternity of their own, spin¬ ning it out of their own brain. Not having intellect enough to fashion an eternity of my own, I must take the theory of the Bible. I believe there is a hell. If I had not been afraid of hell, I do not think I should have started for heaven. You say, “I will not be scared in that way. I will not be affrighted by any future punishment.” You are quite mistaken. I can frighten you half to death in five minutes. As you are walking along the streets, let me pull down the house-scaffolding, weigh¬ ing two or three tons, about your head, and you will look as white as a sheet, while your heart will thump like a trip-hammer. Now, if it is not ignoble to be affrighted about a falling scaffold, is it ignoble to be affrighted by a threat from the Omnipotent God, who with one stroke of his right hand could crush the universe? You ask how God, being a father, could let us suffer in the future world? I answer your question by asking how God, be¬ ing a father, can let suffering be in this world? Tell me why he allowed that woman to whom I administered the holy sacrament this afternoon to have a cancer; tell me why children suffer such pains in teething, the lancet striking such torture in the swollen gums. You fail to explain to me suffering in the present time; be not surprised if I fail to explain to you suffering in the future. On the way to reject the doctrine of future punishment, men begin by rejecting the idea of material fire. In a few years, while they admit future punishment, they deny
that it is eternal. A few years after that they cast out the whqle idea of future punishment, and let all the thieves, pickpockets, and debauchees of the universe go into glory. As far as I can understand the modern popular theory of future punishment, it is that a man goes down and sits on a hard-bottomed chair for a little while, and after he gets tired of roughing it, goes up to sit on cushions in glory. I will give you my idea of future suffering. I do not ask you to take my theory. I am not your pope; I am your pastor. I believe that there is an eternal hell, and I believe that there is literal fire. And this is my evidence:
Matthew xiii., 50 — “And shall cast them into the furnace of fire.”
Rerelation xiv., 10 — “He shall be tormented with fire and brimstone.”
Revelation xix., 20 — “These were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.”
Isaiah lxvi., 24 — “Neither shall their fire be quench¬ ed.”
Matthew xv., 41 — “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.”
Revelation xxi., 8 — “All liars shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.”
Marie ix., 45 — “Better than, having two feet, to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.”
The words in my text — “I am tormented in this flame.”
Would not a common-sense man not prejudiced in the case take this to be fire? literal fire? an all-sweeping fire? an eternal fire Lest you should dispute it, it tells what the fire is to be kept in. It is a furnace of fire. Lest you should say that it is a different kind of fire from that which we know about, it says, “Its smoJce ascendeth lip forever.” Ah! your father and mother, who adopted this literalism, were not such big fools as you make out. They studied their Bibles more than wre do, and read less of the human criticisms that have slopped over on the pure page. All the engines of the nineteenth century have turned their hose toward putting out this fire. But still it has burned on, and will burn forever. It is a great, stubborn, overwhelming fact, that all the ingenuity of men and devils may -war against, but can not destroy. There is not so much evidence that there was a raging fire a few weeks ago in Chicago as that there is to-night a fire in hell; for the one information we have on human authority, the other by the mouths of evangelists and of prophets, and of the Lord Jesus, the Son of God. We have silenced this mighty battery of future punishment, and given to the villains of the wrorld the idea that they shall at last go free; and under your beautiful teachings, Tweed, and Sweeney, and Hall, and Connolly expect to go right up when they die, and sit in the laps of patriarchs and apostles.
God deals with this world in two ways — by treaty and by cannonade: by treaty, in which, for the sake of Jesus Christ, and by the surrender of our hearts to him, he wTill be at peace with us, or by the opening of the smoking batteries of hell fire, by which he will hurl upon his enemies a horrible tempest; and he who will not be drawn by love shall be crushed under his wrath.
See also, from this subject, that heaven is not a myth or an abstraction, but a place of warm personal inter¬ course. Lazarus was carried up to the bosom of Abraham, one of the glorious old patriarchs. I suppose Abra-LAZARUS AND DIVES.
ham happened to meet him at the gate. And so, after death, we will be greeted into glory. Our departed friends will be at the door. They have been waiting for our coming. Count up their number if you can. Your father is there. Your mother is there. Your children are there. Your old neighbors are there. Many of the friends with whom you used to attend church, or do business, are there. They have been dead these five, ten, or twenty years, and have been waiting within the vail. There is no clock in heaven, because it is an everlasting day; yet they keep an account of the passing years, be¬ cause they are all the time hearing from our world. The angels flying through heaven report how many times the earth has turned on its axis, and in that way the angels can keep a diary; and they say it is almost time now for father to come up, or for mother to come up. Some day they see a cohort leaving heaven, and they say, “Whither bound P and the answer is, “To bring up a soul from earth and the question is asked, “What soul P And a family circle in heaven find that it is one of their own number that is to be brought up, and they come out to watch, as on the beach we now watch for the sail of a ship that is to bring our friends home. After a while the cohort will heave in sight, flying nearer and nearer, until with a great clang the gates hoist, and with an embrace, wild with the ecstasy of heaven, old friends meet again.
Away with your stiff, formal heaven! I Want none of it. Give me a place of infinite and eternal sociality. My feet free from the clods of earth, I shall bound the hills with gladness, and break forth in a laugh of triumph. Aha! aha! We weep now, but then we shall laugh. “Abraham’s bosom,” in the text, means that heaven has open arms to take us in. Now we fold our arms over our heart, and tell the world to stand back, as though our bosom were a two-barred gate to keep the world out. Heaven stands not with folded arms, but with heart open. It is “Abraham’s bosom.”
I see a mother and her child meeting at the foot of the throne after some years’ absence. The child died twenty years ago, but it is a child yet. I think the little ones who die will remain children through all eternity. It would be no heaven without the little darlings. I do not want those that are in heaven to grow up. We need their infant voices. in the great song. And when we walk out in the fields of light, we want them to run ahead, and clap their hands, and pick out the brightest of the field flowers. Yes, here is a child and its mother meeting. The child long in glory, the mother just arrived. “How changed you are, my darling!” says the mother. “Yes,” says the child, “this is such a happy place; and Jesus has taken such care of me, and heaven is so kind, I got right over the fever with which I died. The skies are so fair, mother! The flowers are so sweet, mother! The temple is so beautiful, mother! Come, take me up in your arms as you used to.”
Oh, I do not know how we shall stand the first day in heaven. Do you not think we will break down in the song from over-delight? I once gave out in church the hymn,
“There is a land of pure delight,
Where saints immortal reign,”
and an aged man standing in front of the pulpit sang heartily the first verse, and then he sat down weeping.
I said to him afterward, “Father Linton, what made you cry over that hymn?”. He said, “I could not stand it — the joys that are coming.” When heaven rises for the doxology, I can not see how we can rise with it if all these waves of everlasting delight come upon the soul, billow of joy after billow of joy. Methinks Jesus would be enough for the first day in heaven, but here he approaches with all heaven at his back.
Thus I have set before you light and darkness, joy and sorrow, victory and defeat, the rewards of Lazarus, and the overthrow of Dives.
Choose ye between the angelic escort and the parched tongue, between the fountains of God and the waterless desert, between a glorious heaven and a burning hell.
In the name of my God, and with reference to my last account, I have set before you two worlds. Choose te!