Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE DAMNATION OF DIYES. And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments.—Luke 16:23. He has no name. He is called the rich man; or, as it stood in Latin, Dives. It is the beggar who is named. It is true that the rich man in his lack of a name resembles most of the other people of the parables. Our Lord almost never named the characters which He introduced into these illustrative stories. But He did name the beggar. So that there is here presented this interesting contrast: everybody knows the names of rich men, few know the names of beggars ; but there was a certain rich man whose name is not mentioned, and there lay at his gate, in dire poverty and pain, a certain beggar named Lazarus. It is a small thing, and may be without meaning. The beggar may have been an actual person, whom our Lord knew. Jesus was the friend of the residents of the street, and must have been acquainted with a good many beggars. The beggar may have died that day, in his rags and sores, altogether a pitiable person as it seemed; and Jesus mayhave meant to show His disciples that he was a spiritual prince in disguise. There He had sat at the corner of the street who was in truth fit for the society of Abraham. Or perhaps this distinction of a name, denied to Dives and given to Lazarus, signifies the difference between Christ's way of regarding men and the common way. It is an illustration of His disregard of things artificial, external and inconsequent. A friendless beggar, covered with sores, and consorting with street dogs, was at no disadvantage in our Lord's sight compared with a rich man, clad in silk attire, sitting at the head of his handsome table. If the beggar were rich in the imperishable treasure, and the rich man were poor in the currency of heaven, that made a distinction which r... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.