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