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?
NOAH.
Noah did the best and the worst thing for the world. He built an ark against the deluge of water, but he also introduced a deluge against which the human race has ever since been trying to build an ark—the deluge of drunkenness.
In the opening chapters of the Bible we can hear his staggering steps.