And I read that Dives "is tormented." Here again all is natural and as we should expect. The godless man is in some degree tormented in this life--at his best moments, when he stops to think, when he lies awake in the lonely night and conscience speaks to him. But there are many distractions to ease his pain--the pleasures and amusements of life, the company of friends, the pursuit of business, the excitements of ambition. So he can manage a good deal to forget God, to acquire a distaste for God, and yet to dull the still small voice that hurts him. But these distractions are gone now. He has gone out into the new life, naked, alone. All the money and business excitement are gone. All the things of sense and appetite are gone. That poor soul of his, dwarfed and degraded, stands in the dread loneliness before God, full of the sense of loss and misery--of shame for the past--of dread of what is to come--of wretched discord between himself and all that is good. In Hades, says Christ, not in Hell (the Revised Version puts that right), in that life just after death, he lifted up his eyes, being in torment. The Judgment has not come yet. He is not in Hell. Hell has not yet come. Those things are in the final stage of being. But already, just after death, Christ says, he is in torment of soul. § 7 I do not think we should pass over the expression "carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom." Notice that our Lord makes it simple and intelligible for the Jews by using their own phrase, "Abraham's Bosom," their name for the state of the faithful departed immediately after death. And He says, Lazarus "was carried by the angels." If anybody else but Jesus had said it, we might pass this over as a piece of poetic imagery. But it was Jesus who said it. He says so much about the angels. He says that there are guardian angels of the children. He says that the angels rejoice over one sinner that repenteth. He would not say this about Lazarus carried by the angels unless it meant something real. If so I think we have here our Lord's authority for the ministry of angels at death, an indication that the poor soul does not go out solitary into a great lone land--that there are loving watchers around the death-bed "sent forth to minister to the heirs of salvation." I do not know how much weight we should attach to the suggestion that Dives seems the better for the discipline of the new life. His selfishness on earth bulks largely in the story. Now in all his trouble he is thinking of his five brothers "lest they also come to this place of torment." § 9