the sphere of the present life, our effort to
follow it is like the struggle of a living creature out of its element.
Even when the Lord of that unseen world is our instructor, our
conceptions regarding it are necessarily indirect, second hand, and
obscure. In this region the capacity of the scholar is infantile, and,
consequently, the ability of the teacher cannot find scope. While,
therefore, those parts of the parable which lay within our sphere were
direct and literal, the latter portion, lying beyond our sphere, is
necessarily indirect and expressed by signs: consequently, though
sufficiently precise in its larger leading features, it is, in its minor
details, indistinct, inarticulate.

"The beggar died;" this is sufficiently direct and literal: "and was
carried by angels into Abraham's bosom,"--there we are already beyond
our depth. The horizon is dim now, by reason of distance and intervening
clouds. Equally obscure is the other line of information when it has
crossed the boundary of time. The rich man died and was buried; this we
clearly comprehend: but "in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in
torment,"--these are events of the eternal world, shadowed forth in the
language and according to the conceptions of the present. We perceive
the direction in which they lie, and can understand the moral lesson
which they contain, but the things themselves are shrouded from our
intellectual vision in impenetrable darkness. Not perhaps intentionally
in the structure of the parable, but necessarily, on account of the
place where its scene is latterly laid, a veil thicker than that of
allegory is wrapped around it.

In accordance with the use of the word in classic Greek, and of the
corresponding term in the Hebrew Scriptures, we might assume that "hell"
(Hades) only indicates generally the world of spirits, as distinguished
from this life in the body; while the expression "being in torment,"
serves to determine the specific region or condition in that world to
which the rich man was consigned: the term, however, wherever it occurs
in the New Testament, seems to be applied, in point of fact, to the
place of punishment, except in passages that are directly quoted from
the Old Testament. Both were now in the world of spirits; but the beggar
in that world was in Abraham's bosom, and the rich man in torment. Both
spirits near the same time passed from this world by the same narrow
passage; beyond the boundary their paths diverge