They build up fortunes that overshadow the earth. They confound all the life-insurance tables on the subject of longevity, dying octogenarians, perhaps nonagenarians, possibly centenarians. Ahab in the palace, Naboth in the cabinet. Unclean Herod on the throne, consecrated Paul twisting ropes for tent-making. Manasseh, the worst of all the kings of Juda, living longer than any of them. While the general rule is the wicked do not live out half their days, there are exceptions where they live on to great age and in a Paradise of beauty and luxuriance, and die with a whole college of physicians expending its skill in trying further prolongation of life, and have a funeral with casket under mountain of calla-lilies, the finest equipages of the city jingling and flashing into line, the poor, angle-worm of the dust carried out to its hole in the ground with the pomp that might make a spirit from some other world suppose that the Archangel Michael was dead.
Go up among the finest residences of the city, and on some of the door-plates you will find the names of those mightiest for commercial and social iniquity. They are the vampires of society—they are the gorgons of the century. Some of these men have each wheel of their carriage a juggernaut wet with the blood of those sacrificed to their avarice. Some of them are like Caligula, who wished that all the people had only one neck that he might strike it off at one blow. Oh, the slain, the slain! A long procession of usurers and libertines and infamous quacks and legal charlatans and world-grabbing monsters. What apostleship of despoliation! Demons incarnate. Hundreds of men concentering all their energies of body, mind, and soul in one prolonged, ever-intensifying, and unrelenting effort to scald and scarify and blast and consume the world. I do not blame you for asking me the quivering, throbbing, burning, resounding, appalling question of my text, "Wherefore do the wicked live?"
In the first place, they live to demonstrate beyond all controversy the long-suffering patience of God. You sometimes say, under some great affront, "I will not stand it;" but perhaps you are compelled to stand it. God, with all the batteries of omnipotence loaded with thunderbolts, stands it century after century. I have no doubt sometimes an angel comes to Him and suggests, "Now is the time to strike." "No," says God; "wait a year, wait twenty years, wait a century, wait five centuries." What God does is not so wonderful as what He does not do. He has the reserve corps with which He could strike Mormonism and Mohammedanism and Paganism from the earth in a day. He could take all the fraud in New York on the west side of Broadway and hurl it into the Hudson, and all the fraud on the east side of Broadway and hurl it into the East River in an hour. He understands the combination lock of every dishonest money-safe, and could blow it up quicker than by any earthly explosive. Written all over the earth, written all over history are the words, "Divine forbearance, divine leniency, divine long-suffering."
I wonder that God did not burn this world up two thousand years ago, scattering its ashes into immensity, its aerolites dropping into other worlds to be kept in their museums as specimens of a defunct planet. People sometimes talk of God as though He were hasty in His judgments and as though He snapped men up quick. Oh, no! He waited one hundred and twenty years for the people to get into the ark, and warned them all the time—one hundred and twenty years, then the flood came. The Anchor Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing of the "Circassia," the White Star Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing of the "Britannic," the Cunard Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing of the "Oregon;" but of the sailing of that ship that Noah commanded God gave one hundred and twenty years' announcement and warning. Patience antediluvian, patience postdiluvian, patience in times Adamic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, Pauline, Lutheran, Whitefieldian. Patience with men and nations. Patience with barbarisms and civilizations. Six thousand years of patience! Overtopping attribute of God, all of whose attributes are immeasurable. Why do the wicked live? That their overthrow may be the more impressive and climacteric. They must pile up their mischief until all the community shall see it, until the nation shall see it, until all the world shall see it. The higher it goes up the harder it will come down and the grander will be the divine vindication.
God will not allow sin to sneak out of the world. God will not allow it merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would not be any more conspicuous.
About fifteen years ago we had in this country a most illustrious instance of how God lets a man go on in iniquity, so that at the close of the career his overthrow may be the more impressive, full of warning and climacteric. First, an honest chairmaker, then an alderman, then a member of congress, then a supervisor of a city, then school commissioner, then state senator, then commissioner of public works—on and up, stealing thousands of dollars here and thousands of dollars there, until the malfeasance in office overtopped anything the world had ever seen—making the new Court House in New York a monument of municipal crime, and rushing the debt of the city from thirty-six million dollars to ninety-seven millions. Now, he is at the top of millionairedom.
Country-seat terraced and arbored and parterred clear to the water's brink. Horses enough to stock a king's equerry. Grooms and postilions in full rig. Wine cellars enough to make a whole legislature drunk. New York finances and New York politics in his vest pocket. He winked, and men in high place fell. He lifted his little finger, and ignoramuses took important office. He whispered, and in Albany and Washington they said it thundered. Wider and mightier and more baleful his influence, until it seemed as if Pandemonium was to be adjourned to this world, and in the Satanic realm there was to be a change of administration, and Apollyon, who had held dominion so long, should have a successful competitor.
To bring all to a climax, a wedding came in the house of that man. Diamonds as large as hickory nuts. A pin of sixty diamonds representing sheaves of wheat. Musicians in a semicircle, half-hidden by a great harp of flowers. Ships of flowers. Forty silver sets, one of them with two hundred and forty pieces. One wedding-dress that cost five thousand dollars. A famous libertine, who owned several Long Island Sound steamboats, and not long before he was shot for his crimes, sent as a wedding present to that house a frosted silver iceberg, with representations of arctic bears walking on icicle-handles and ascending the spoons. Was there ever such a convocation of pictures, bronzes, of bric-à-brac, of grandeurs, social grandeurs? The highest wave of New York splendor rolled into that house and recoiled perhaps never again to rise so high. But just at that time, when all earthly and infernal observation was concentered on that man, eternal justice, impersonated by that wonder of the American bar, Charles O'Connor, got on the track of the offender. First arraignment, then sentence to twelve years' imprisonment under twelve indictments, then penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, then a lawsuit against him for six million dollars, then incarceration in Ludlow Street jail, then escape to foreign land, to be brought back under the stout grip of the constabulary, then dying of broken heart in a prison cell. God allowed him to go on in iniquity until all the world saw as never before that "the way of the transgressor is hard," and that dishonesty will not declare permanent dividends, and that you had better be an honest chairmaker with a day's wages at a time than a brilliant commissioner of public works, all your pockets crammed with plunder.
What a brilliant figure in history is William the Conqueror, the intimidator of France, of Anjou, of Brittany, victor at Hastings, snatching the crown of England and setting it on his own brow, destroying homesteads that he might have a larger game forest, making a Doomsday Book by which he could keep the whole land under despotic espionage, proclaiming war in revenge for a joke uttered in regard to his obesity. Harvest fields and vineyards going down under the cavalry hoof. Nations horror-struck. But one day while at the apex of all observation he is riding out and the horse put his hoof on a hot cinder, throwing the king so violently against the pommel of the saddle that he dies, his son hastening to England to get the crown before the breath has left his father's body.
The imperial corpse drawn by a cart, most of the attendants leaving it in the street because of a fire alarm that they might go off and see the conflagration. And just as they are going to put his body down in the church which he had built, a man stepping up and saying, "Bishop, the man you praise is a robber. This church stands on my father's homestead. The property on which this church is built is mine. I reclaim my right. In the name of Almighty God I forbid you to bury the king here, or to cover him with my glebe." "Go up," said the ambition of William the Conqueror. "Go up by conquest, go up by throne, go up in the sight of all nations, go up by cruelties." But one day God said, "Come down, come down by the way of a miserable death, come down by the way of an ignominious obsequies, come down in the sight of all nations, come clear down, come down forever." And you and I see the same thing on a smaller scale many and many a time—illustrations of the fact that God lets the wicked live that He may make their overthrow the more climacteric.