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.