From what the parable has led us to consider, we shall feel the necessity of improving our time in preparation for eternity. Whether the smiles or frowns of fortune be upon us, it should be remembered that death will soon terminate our present joys or sorrows, and that our condition in a future world will be decided by our conduct in this. When the shoreless ocean of eternity shall expand before us, it is certain that we shall then be, either members of the heavenly banquet, or outcasts with the wretched. Let us endeavour to prevent this latter terrible evil, by establishing our faith on the gospel of Christ, and by acting, in every state of our probation, suitably to such belief. Wherefore, "giving thanks always for all things unto God," let us "receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save our souls.” bib He

"And in Hell he lift his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom."

I have already addressed you upon the subject of this parable, but as the limits of a single discourse did not admit of those explanations which the subject seems to demand, I shall avail myself of the present opportunity, to point out and clear the few difficulties in which it has been thought by some to be involved.

It will be observed, then, that the rich man is represented as suffering penal torments in Hell, and the poor man as enjoying perfect blessedness in Heaven, before the final resurrection to judgment. The Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory may appear, without a due consideration of the subject, to be countenanced by this parable of our blessed Lord; and the rather, too, as some of

the early Christian fathers imagined it to be, not a fable, but a real history. In order to clear both these points, and to remove those difficulties which appear to lie in the way of a right understanding of this parable, I shall beg your attention to the following considerations.

After the conquest of Syria, by Alexander of Macedon, who very greatly favoured the Jews, the intercourse of these latter with the Greeks was considerably increased; and this, indeed, continued when Syria became a kingdom under Alexander's successor in that country; nor ceased altogether until the Jews were finally ejected from Palestine, and were doomed, as before, in their captivity, "to sing the Lord's song in a strange land." Accomplished as the Greeks were, in all the captivating graces of poetry and eloquence, to which their language, at once energetic, copious, and expressive, very greatly contributed; and having embellished with the splendours of poetry a system of mythology, though complex and confused, still sufficiently specious and alluring, it is no wonder that, during a lengthened intercourse, the Jews, who were certainly much inferior to their heathen neighbours in intellectual acuteness, should have imbibed some of their notions respecting the condition of eternity; especially where these notions nearly assimilated with their own.

That the Jews differed even among themselves in their opinions, respecting the state of the soul

after death, is clear from the opposite tenets of the Pharisees and Sadducees; and some of the former have even been charged with embracing the doctrine of the Eastern philosophers, who maintained that the soul entered into a different body after death, and proceeded in progressive changes towards a state of eternal purity and fitness for uninterrupted fruition. That the Jews had, moreover, imbibed many of the ideas of the Greeks concerning the condition of the soul in the next life, I take to be fully confirmed by the parable before us, because, as it must be evident that it was delivered by Christ for the instruction of his hearers, he would necessarily use those terms which were most familiar to their ears, and adopt those images with which they were best acquainted. It does not, however, therefore, follow that, because he used those images, they were really the very exact representations of the reality. Although the Saviour judiciously adapted his instructions to the prejudices, and even to the errors of those whom he addressed, frequently giving, as in the parable under discussion, imaginary representations of things, not as they really were, but as his hearers imagined them to be; nevertheless, we shall invariably find the doctrine the same, which he designed to illustrate, whatever may be the garb in which it is brought before us. Christ, then, in describing the state of the rich man and Lazarus, accommodated himself, no doubt, to the prevailing opinion

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among the Jews, at the period of his preaching: and how near their ideas concerning the state of departed souls, at that time, approached those of the Greeks, we shall presently see ai ste se te The Hell spoken of in the parable, which we have assumed to be delivered in accommodation to the derived notions of the Hellenist Jews, is the place where, as they seem to have imagined, the righteous receive the final reward of their good works, and the wicked the punishment of their iniquities, in the world to come. It appears to have been divided into two separate parts, like the Tartarus and Elysian Fields of the heathens, the one, occupied by the good; the other, by the wicked. The abodes of the blessed and the regions of the damned lay so contiguous, being only sepa+ rated by a deep gulph, that the departed souls. could converse with each other from their opposite banks, oft noge noresteri de otests of vlodil 320m

This is precisely similar to the heathen Hell. In the parable, too, the souls of the rich man and of Abraham converse together, as if they had been embodied. In like manner the Pagans introduce departed souls talking together, and represent them as having pains and pleasures analogous to what they feel in this life. The parable says, the souls of wicked men are tormented in flames; the Grecian mythologists tell us, that, they lie in a certain river of fire, where they suffer the same torments which they would have suffered whilst