THE WALLS OF ST. ANTIPAS FALL AT THE THIRD BLAST

On that dreaded morning a few weeks later, when the young minister faced a thronged St. Antipas at eleven o’clock service, his wife looked up at him from Aunt Bell’s side in a pew well forward ­the pew of Cyrus Browett ­looked up at him in trembling, loving wonder.  Then a little tender half-smile of perfect faith went dreaming along her just-parted lips.  Let the many prototypes of Dives in St. Antipas ­she could see the relentless profile of their chief at her right ­be offended by his rugged speech:  he should find atoning comfort in her new love.  Like Luther, he must stand there to say out the soul of him, and she was prostrate before his brave greatness.

When, at last, he came to read the biting verses of the parable, her heart beat as if it would be out to him, her face paled and hardened with the strain of his ordeal.

     “And it came to pass that the beggar died and was carried by
     the angels into Abraham’s bosom; the rich man also died and
     was buried.

     “And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and
     seeth Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom.

     “And he cried and said, ’Father Abraham, have mercy on me and
     send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water
     and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.’

     “But Abraham said, ’Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime
     receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things;
     but now he is comforted and thou art tormented.’”

The sermon began.  Unflinchingly the preacher pointed out that Dives, apparently, lay in hell for no other reason than that he had been a rich man; no sin was imputed to him; not even unbelief; he had not only transgressed no law, but was doubtless a respectable, God-fearing man of irreproachable morals ­sent to hell for his wealth.

And Lazarus appeared to have won heaven merely by reason of his poverty.  No virtue, no active good conduct, was accredited to him.

Reading with the eye of common understanding, Jesus taught that the rich merited eternal torment by reason of their riches, and the poor merited eternal life by reason of their poverty, a belief that one might hear declared even to-day.  Nor was this view attested solely by this parable.  Jesus railed constantly at those in high places, at the rich and at lawyers, and the chief priests and elders and those in authority ­declaring that he had been sent, not to them, but to the poor who needed a physician.

But was there not a seeming inconsistency here in the teachings of the Master?  If the poor achieved heaven automatically by their mere poverty, why were they still needing a physician? Under that view, why were not the rich those who needed a physician ­according to the literal words of Jesus?

Up to the close of this passage the orator’s manner had been one of glacial severity ­of a sternness apparently checked by rare self-control from breaking into a denunciation of the modern Dives.  Then all was changed.  His face softened and lighted; the broad shoulders seemed to relax from their uncompromising squareness; he stood more easily upon his feet; he glowed with a certain encouraging companionableness.

Was that, indeed, the teaching of Jesus ­as if in New York to-day he might say, “I have come to Third Avenue rather than to Fifth?” Can this crudely literal reading of his words prevail?  Does it not carry its own refutation ­the extreme absurdity of supposing that Jesus would come to the squalid Jews of the East Side and denounce the better elements that maintain a church like St. Antipas?

The fallacy were easily probed.  A modern intelligence can scarcely prefigure heaven or hell as a reward or punishment for mere carnal comfort or discomfort ­as many literal-minded persons believe that Jesus taught.  The Son of Man was too subtle a philosopher to teach that a rich man is lost by his wealth and a poor man saved by his poverty, though primitive minds took this to be his meaning.  Some primitive minds still believe this ­witness the frequent attempts to read a literal meaning into certain other words of Jesus:  the command, for example, that a man should give up his cloak also, if he be sued for his coat.  Little acumen is required to see that no society could protect itself against the depredations of the lawless under such a system of non-resistance; and we may be sure that Jesus had no intention of tearing down the social structure or destroying vested rights.  Those who demand a literal construction of the parable of Dives and Lazarus must look for it in the Bowery melodrama, wherein the wealthy only are vicious and poverty alone is virtuous.

We have only to consider the rawness of this conception to perceive that Jesus is not to be taken literally.

Who, then, is the rich man and who the poor ­who is the Dives and who the Lazarus of this intensely dramatic parable?

Dives is but the type of the spiritually rich man who has not charity for his spiritually poor brother; of the man rich in faith who will not trouble to counsel the doubting; of the one rich in humility who will yet not seek to save his neighbour from arrogance; of him rich in charity who indifferently views his uncharitable brethren; of the man rich in hope who will not strive to make hopeful the despairing; of the one rich in graces of the Holy Ghost who will not seek to reclaim the unsanctified beggar at his gate.

And who is Lazarus but a type of the aspiring ­the soul-hungry, whether he be a millionaire or a poor clerk ­the determined seeker whose eye is single and whose whole body is full of light?  In this view, surely more creditable to the intellect of our Saviour, mere material wealth ceases to signify; the Dives of spiritual reality may be the actual beggar rich in faith yet indifferent to the soul-hunger of the faithless; while poor Lazarus may be the millionaire, thirsting, hungering, aspiring, day after day, for crumbs of spiritual comfort that the beggar, out of the abundance of his faith, would never miss.

Christianity has suffered much from our failure to give the Saviour due credit for subtlety.  So far as money ­mere wealth ­is a soul-factor at all, it must be held to increase rather than to diminish its possessor’s chances of salvation, but not in merely providing the refinements of culture and the elegances of modern luxury and good taste, important though these are to the spirit’s growth.  The true value of wealth to the soul ­a value difficult to over-estimate ­is that it provides opportunity for, and encourages the cultivation of, that virtue which is “the greatest of all these”; that virtue which “suffereth long and is kind; which vaunteth not itself and is not puffed up” ­Charity, in short.  While not denying the simple joys of penury, nor forgetting the Saviour’s promises to the poor and meek and lowly, it is still easy to understand that charity is less likely to be a vigorous soul-growth in a poor man than in a rich.  The poor man may possess it as a germ, a seed; but the rich man is, through superior prowess in the struggle for existence, in a position to cultivate this virtue; and who will say that he has not cultivated it?  Certainly no one acquainted with the efforts of our wealthy men to uplift the worthy poor.  A certain modern sentimentality demands that poverty be abolished ­ignoring those pregnant words of Jesus ­“the poor ye have always with you” ­forgetting, indeed, that human society is composed of unequal parts, even as the human body; that equality exists among the social members only in this:  that all men have their origin in God the Creator, have sinned in Adam, and have been, by the sacrificial blood of God’s only begotten Son, born of the Virgin Mary, equally redeemed into eternal life, if they will but accept Christ as their only true Saviour; ­forgetting indeed that to abolish poverty would at once prevent all manifestations of human nature’s most beauteous trait and virtue ­Charity.

Present echoes from the business world indicate that the poor man to-day, with his vicious discontent, his preposterous hopes of trades-unionism, and his impracticable and very un-Christian dreams of an industrial millennium, is the true and veritable Dives, rich in arrogance and poor in that charity of judgment which the millionaire has so abundantly shown himself to possess.

The remedy was for the world to come up higher.  Standing upon one of the grand old peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the speaker had once witnessed a scene in the valley below which, for beauty of illustration of the thought in hand, the world could not surpass.  He told his hearers what the scene was.  And he besought them to come up to the rock of Charity and mingle in the blue serene.  Charity ­a tear dropped on the world’s cold cheek of intolerance to make it burn forever!  Or it was the grand motor-power which, like a giant engine, has rolled the car of civilisation out from the maze of antiquity into the light of the present day where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, then to speed on to that hoped-for golden era when truth shall rise as a new and blazing star to light the splendid pageantry of earth, bound together in one law of universal brotherhood, independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence.  Charity indeed was what Voltaire meant to inculcate when he declared:  “Atheism and fanaticism are the two poles of a universe of confusion and horror.  The narrow zone of virtue is between these two.  March with a firm step in that path; believe in a good God and do good.”

The peroration was beautifully simple, thrilling the vast throng with a sudden deeper conviction of the speaker’s earnestness:  “Charity! Oh, of all the flowers that have swung their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of charity.  Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be crushed before their fragrance becomes perceptible; but this flower at early morn, at burning noon and when the dew of eve is on the flowers, has coursed its way down the garden walk, out through the deep, dark dell, over the burning plain, and up the mountain side ­up, ever UP it rises into the beautiful blue ­up along the cloudy corridors of the day, up along the misty pathway to the skies till it touches the beautiful shore and mingles with the breath of angels.”

Hardly was there a dissenting voice in all St. Antipas that Sabbath upon the proposal that this powerful young preacher be called to its pulpit.  The few who warily suggested that he might be too visionary, not sufficiently in touch with the present day, were quieted the following Sabbath by a very different sermon on certain flaws in the fashionable drama.

The one and only possible immorality in this world, contended the speaker, was untruth.  A sermon was as immoral as any stage play if the soul of it was not Truth; and a stage play became as moral as a sermon if its soul was truth.  The special form of untruth he attacked was what he styled “the drama of the glorified wanton.”  Warmly and ably did he denounce the pernicious effect of those plays, that take the wanton for a heroine and sentimentalise her into a morbid attractiveness.  The stage should show life, and the wanton, being of life, might be portrayed; but let it be with ruthless fidelity.  She must not be falsified into a creature of fine sensibilities and lofty emotions ­a thing of dangerous plausibility to the innocent.

The last doubter succumbed on the third Sabbath, when he preached from the warning of Jesus that many would come after him, performing in his name wonders that might deceive, were it possible, even the very elect.  The sermon likened this generation to the people Paul found in Athens, running curiously after any new god; after Christian Science ­which he took the liberty of remarking was neither Christian nor scientific ­or mental science, spiritism, theosophy, clairvoyance, all black arts, straying from the fold of truth into outer darkness ­forgetting that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed therein might not perish, but have everlasting life.”  As this was the sole means of salvation that God had provided, the time was, obviously, one fraught with vital interest to every thinking man.

As a sagacious member of the Board of Trustees remarked, it would hardly have been possible to preach three sermons better calculated, each in its way, to win the approval of St. Antipas.

The call came and was accepted after the signs of due and prayerful consideration.  But as for Nancy, she had left off certain of her wonderings forever.