LAZARUS.
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?