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?