Part 14
The father, Jacob, can hardly think it is his boy. Why, the smooth brow of childhood has now become a wrinkled brow--wrinkled with the cares of state--and the garb of the shepherd boy has become a robe royally bedizened!
But as the old man finally realizes that it is actually Joseph, I see the thin lip quiver against the toothless gum, as he cries out: “Now let me die, since I have seen thy face; behold, Joseph is yet alive!”
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?
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.
Shem and Japhet tried to cover up the disgrace, but there is Noah--drunk on wine at a time in the history of the world when, to say the least, there was no lack of water.
Inebriation, having flooded the world, has never receded.
Abigail, the fair and heroic wife who saved the flocks of Nabal, her husband, from confiscation by invaders, goes home at night and finds him so intoxicated she can not tell him the story of his narrow escape.
Uriah came to see David, and David got him drunk, and paved the way for the despoliation of his household.
Even the church bishops needed to be charged to be sober and not given to too much wine; and so familiar were the people of Bible times with the staggering and falling motions of the inebriate, that Isaiah, when he comes to describe the final dislocation of worlds, says: “The Earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard.”
OTHNIEL.
The city of Debir was the Boston of antiquity--a great place for brains and books.
Caleb wanted it, and he offered his daughter Achsah as a prize to any one who would besiege or storm and capture that city.
It was a strange thing for Caleb to do; and yet the man who could take the city would have, at any rate, two elements of manhood--bravery and patriotism.
Besides, I do not think that Caleb was as foolish in offering his daughter to the conqueror of Debir as thousands in this day who seek alliances for their children with those who have large means, without any reference to moral or mental acquirements.
Of the two evils, I would rather measure happiness by the length of the sword than by the length of the pocket-book. In one case there is sure to be one good element of character; in the other, there may be none at all.
With Caleb’s daughter as a prize to fight for, General Othniel rode into the battle. The gates of Debir were thundered into the dust, and the city of books lay at the feet of the conquerors.
The work done, Othniel comes back to claim his bride. Having conquered the city, it is no great job for him to conquer the girl’s heart; for, however faint-hearted a woman herself may be, she always loves courage in a man. I never saw an exception to that.
The wedding festivity having gone by, Othniel and Achsah are about to go to their new home. However loudly the cymbals may clash and the laughter ring, the parents are always sad when a fondly cherished daughter goes away to stay; and Achsah, the daughter of Caleb, knows that now is the time to ask almost any thing she wants of her father.
It seems that Caleb, the good old man, had given as a wedding present to his daughter a piece of land that was mountainous, and, sloping southward toward the deserts of Arabia, it was swept by some very hot winds. It was called “a south land.”
But Achsah wants an addition of property; she desires a piece of land that is well watered and fertile.
Now, it is no wonder that Caleb, standing amid the bridal party, his eyes so full of tears because his daughter was going away that he could hardly see her at all, gives her more than she asks. She said to him: “Thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water.” And he gave her the upper springs and the nether springs.
That passage occurs in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Joshua, nineteenth verse, but I never saw it till a little while ago; and as I came upon it I said: “If God will give me grace, I shall preach a sermon on that before long.”
The fact is that, as Caleb, the father, gave Achsah, the daughter, a south land, so God gives to us His world. I am very thankful that He has given it to us.
But I am like Achsah in the fact that I am not satisfied with the portion. Trees, flowers, grasses and blue skies are very well in their places; but he who has naught except this world for a portion has no portion at all. It is a mountainous land, sloping off toward the desert of sorrow, swept by fiery siroccos. It is “a south land”--a poor portion for any man who tries to put trust in it.
PAUL.
The Damascus of Bible times still stands, with a population of 135,000 people. It was a gay city of white and glistering architecture, its minarets and crescents and domes playing with the light of the morning sun; embowered in groves of olive, citron, orange and pomegranate; a famous river plunging its brightness into the scene--a city by the ancients styled “a pearl surrounded by emeralds.”
A group of horsemen are advancing upon that city. Let the Christians of the place hide, for that cavalcade coming over the hills is made up of persecutors.
Their leader is small of stature and unattractive in some respects, as leaders sometimes are insignificant in person--witness the Duke of Wellington and Dr. Archibald Alexander. But there is something very intent in the eye of the man at the head of this troop, and the horse he rides is lathered with the foam of a long and a quick travel of 135 miles. He cries “Go ’long” to his steed, for those Christians must be captured and must be silenced, and that religion of the cross must be annihilated.
Suddenly the horses shy off, and plunge until their riders are precipitated. Freed from their riders, the horses bound snorting away.
You know that dumb animals, at the sight of an eclipse or an earthquake, or any thing like a supernatural appearance, sometimes become very uncontrollable.
A new sun had been kindled in the heavens, putting out the glare of the ordinary sun. Christ, with the glories of Heaven wrapped about Him, looked out from a cloud and the splendor was insufferable, and no wonder the horses sprang and the equestrians dropped.
Dust-covered and bruised, Saul attempts to get up, shading his eyes with his hand from the severe luster of the heavens, but unsuccessfully, for he is struck stone blind as he cries out: “Who art Thou, Lord?”
Jesus answered him:
“I am the One you have been chasing. He that whips and scourges those Damascine Christians whips and scourges Me. It is not their back that is bleeding; it is Mine. It is not their heart that is breaking; it is Mine. I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest.”
From that wild, exciting and overwhelming scene there rises up the greatest preacher of all ages--Paul; in whose behalf prisons were rocked down, before whom soldiers turned pale, into whose hand Mediterranean sea captains put control of their shipwrecking craft, and whose epistles are the advance courier of the Resurrection Day.
I learn, first, from this scene that a worldly fall may precede a spiritual uplifting. A man does not get much sympathy by falling off a horse. People say he ought not to have got into the saddle if he could not ride. Those of us who were brought up in the country remember well how the workmen laughed when, on our way back from the brook, we suddenly lost our ride. At the close of the great Civil War, when the army passed in review at Washington, if a general had toppled from the stirrups it would have been a national merriment.
Here is Paul on horseback--a proud man, riding on with government documents in his pocket, a graduate of a most famous school in which the celebrated Dr. Gamaliel had been a professor, perhaps having already attained two of the three titles of the school: Rab, the first; Rabbi, the second; and was on his way to Rabbak, the third and highest title.
I know from Paul’s temperament that his horse was ahead of the other horses. But without time to think of what posture he should take, or without any consideration for his dignity, he is tumbled into the dust. And yet that was the best ride Paul ever took. Out of that violent fall he arose into the apostleship. So it has been in all the ages, and so it is now.
You will never be worth any thing for God and the Church until you lose fifty thousand dollars, or have your reputation upset, or in some way, somehow, are thrown and humiliated. You must go down before you go up.
Joseph finds his path to the Egyptian court through the pit into which his brothers threw him.
Daniel would never have walked amid the bronze lions that adorned the Babylonish throne if he had not first walked amid the real lions of the cave.
Paul marshals all the generations of Christendom by falling flat on his face on the road to Damascus.
Men who have been always prosperous may be efficient servants of the world, but will be of no advantage to Christ. You may ride majestically seated on your charger, rein in hand, foot in stirrup, but you will never be worth any thing spiritually until you fall off. They who graduate from the School of Christ with the highest honors have on their diploma the seal of a lion’s muddy paw, or the plash of an angry wave, or the drop of a stray tear, or the brown scorch of a persecuting fire.
In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand there is no moral or spiritual elevation until there has been a thorough worldly upsetting.
Again, I learn from the subject that the religion of Christ is not a pusillanimous thing. People of this day try to make us believe that Christianity is something for men of small caliber, for women with no capacity to reason, for children in the infant class, under six years of age, but not for stalwart men.
Look at this man who is mentioned in the ninth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Do you not think that the religion that could capture such a man as that must have some power in it?
Paul was a logician; he was a metaphysician; he was an all-conquering orator; he was a poet of the highest type. He had a nature that could swamp the leading men of his own day, and, hurled against the Sanhedrim, he made it tremble.
Paul learned all he could get in the school of his immediate vicinity; then he went to a higher school, and there mastered the Greek and the Hebrew, and also perfected himself in belles-lettres, until in after years he astonished the Cretans, the Corinthians and the Athenians by quotations from their own authors.
I have never found any thing in Carlyle or Goethe or Herbert Spencer that could compare in strength or in beauty with Paul’s Epistles. I do not think there is any thing in the writings of Sir William Hamilton that shows such mental discipline as you find in Paul’s argument about justification and the resurrection. I have not found any thing in Milton finer in the way of imagination than I can find in Paul’s illustrations drawn from the amphitheater.
There was nothing in Robert Emmet pleading for his life, or in Edmund Burke arraigning Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall, that compared with the scene in the court room when, before robed officials, Paul bowed and began his speech, saying: “I think myself happy, King Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself this day.”
I repeat the assertion that a religion that can capture such a man as that must have some power in it. It is time people stopped talking as though all the brains of the world were opposed to Christianity. Where Paul leads we can afford to follow.
I am glad to know that Christ has in the different ages of the world had in His discipleship a Mozart and a Handel in music; a Raphael and a Reynolds in painting; an Angelo and a Canova in sculpture; a Rush and a Harvey in medicine; a Grotius and a Washington in statesmanship; a Blackstone, a Marshall and a Kent in law.
The time will come when the religion of Christ will conquer all the observatories and universities, and then, through her telescope Philosophy will behold the morning star of Jesus, and in her laboratory see that “all things work together for good,” and with her geological hammer discover the “Rock of Ages.”
Instead of cowering and shivering when the skeptic stands before you and talks of religion as though it were a pusillanimous thing, take your New Testament from your pocket and show him the picture of the intellectual giant of all the ages, prostrated on the road to Damascus, while his horse is flying wildly away. Then ask the skeptic what it was that frightened the one and threw the other.
Oh, no! It is no weak Gospel. It is a most glorious Gospel. It is an all-conquering Gospel. It is an omnipotent Gospel. It is the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation.
Jesus and Paul were boys at the same time in different villages, and Paul’s antipathy to Christ was increasing. He hated every thing about Christ. He was going down then with writs in his pockets to have Christ’s disciples arrested. He was not going as a sheriff goes--to arrest a man against whom he has no spite--but Paul was going down to arrest those people because he was glad to arrest them. The Bible says: “He breathed out slaughter.” He wanted them captured, and he also wanted them butchered.