The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus

NOR can any objection be brought successfully against this system of tactics. Its fruits were good beyond parallel. Its conceptions and purpose were strictly honorable, and admissible to all. So common is it for men in discussion to resort to this style of argument, that it is fully recognized in all works on logic as legitimate in debate, and claims for itself a distinct department and name. Archbishop Whately defines it as follows: "The argumentum ad hominem is addressed to the peculiar circumstances, character, avowed opinions, or past conduct of the individual, and therefore has a reference to him only, and does not bear directly and absolutely on the real question, as the argumentum ad rem does. It appears, then (to speak rather more technically), that in the argumentum ad hominem the conclusion which actually is established, is not the absolute and general one in question, but relative and particular, viz., not that such and such is the fact, but that this man is bound to admit it, in conformity to his principles of reasoning, or in consistency with his own conduct, situation, etc. Such a conclusion it is often both allowable and necessary to establish, in order to silence those who will not yield to fair general argument; or to convince those whose weakness and prejudices would not allow them to assign to it its due weight. It is thus that our Lord on many occasions silences the cavils of the Jews."—Elements of Logic, pp. 170, 171.

Thus it appears that, as its name implies, it is an "argument to the man," i. e., the conclusion is one which he must accept, because regularly drawn from premises which he admits to be sound. The individual making the argument need not indorse the premises which he thus employs, but he must believe in the conclusion, having reached it from premises which he himself could approve. For example: Were a gentleman from South Carolina, and one from Massachusetts, discussing the propriety of legalizing dueling, the former affirming, and the latter denying, it would not be an unheard of thing if the gentleman advocating the code of honor should declare his conviction that in some way God, or the fates, presides over such contests, so ordering that the result would prove the justice of the cause of the triumphing party. To meet this position upon strictly philosophical grounds would require time, and perhaps skill in debate. To avoid unnecessary delay, therefore, the Massachusetts man would look about him for some familiar illustration which would answer his purpose. He bethinks him of the great Rebellion. To his mind it was conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity. Not so, however, to that of his friend. He has been in the habit of regarding it as a noble struggle for separate national existence. The Massachusetts gentleman, knowing this to be the case, says to him, So and so, your theory that the ends of justice are served by resort to violence when individuals have personal altercations, is not sound; as I think I can satisfy you in a moment's time. Going to war is simply dueling on a large scale. Now, you were a soldier in the army for the Southern Confederacy; the war for their independence was a failure; and, therefore, if you are right in your theory of dueling, you ought to accept the results of that war as conclusive proof that the South was wrong, and the North right. Would not such reasoning be final? You answer in the affirmative, and admit that the overthrow of the duelist was most complete.

But suppose that the Carolinian should still persist in his theory, offering as an objection to the logic of the New Englander that his illustration was not good, since he did not individually believe in the rectitude of the Southern cause? To this the Massachusetts man would reply, "I was trying to convince you, sir, and not myself, that the decisions of war are not always equitable, and therefore I selected an illustration to which you could not take exceptions. My personal opinions had been framed long before, upon historic facts and observations which were satisfactory to myself; now, therefore, before you can evade the deduction which I have made from the premises laid down, you must concede that those premises are incorrect." It may be true that in the hypothetical illustration furnished above, the result reached would have been more satisfactory, because more general in its effect, if the premises, as well as the conclusion drawn from them, had been thoroughly correct; but as the decision reached could, under other circumstances, be vindicated in the use of data to which there could have been no exceptions, the means employed were fully justifiable, and the brevity of the time required in the employment of such a stratagem in making an individual acknowledge an important fact, and renounce a dangerous error, was a consideration of sufficient weight to call for a resort to the method pursued.

With our Lord, however, the one object had in view was the confounding of the Pharisees,—a thing which could not have been accomplished so perfectly in the use of a deduction from premises which, though well taken in every particular, had never received the full sanction of their authority. It was important that their prestige with the people as spiritual teachers should be completely destroyed. In no way could this have been done so effectually as by confounding them before the multitude, without traveling outside of their own record to obtain the instruments with which to do the work. Nor can any better evidence be given in vindication of the wisdom of the method employed, than is found in the absence from the context of everything like a declaration of dissent from his haughty opponents, either from the deduction which he made, or the means employed in reaching the same. Christ understood his men, and knew his opportunity. It was not the first time that he had employed the argumentum ad hominem to the confusion of those proud, self-sufficient teachers of the law, with whom consistency was more highly prized than truth. How successfully, for example, did he use it when they sought to condemn him for healing on the Sabbath day. Why, said he, "Doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?" Luke 13:15, 16. Again, on a subsequent occasion: "Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day? And they could not answer him again to these things." Luke 14:5, 6.

In these cases, as in many more which might be cited, it will be perceived that Christ does not stop to elaborate an argument to prove that the ox or the ass could properly be watered, or taken from the pit, on holy time; but he takes the short cut to the objective point in view, by appealing to those practices which they admitted to be correct, and then draws the conclusion therefrom that they, judged by their own opinions and usages, fully justified all that he had done. Just as, in the case of the rich man and Lazarus, he reasoned that they, by admitting that it was possible for the former to go to hell, and the latter to Abraham's bosom, had completely stultified themselves by holding one set of doctrines utterly irreconcilable with another in which they also believed. If, however, we would find another instance of the use by the Saviour of the argumentum ad hominem under circumstances more nearly like those attending the giving of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, it will be obtained from reading the account given of the interview between the Lord and certain individuals in regard to the casting out of devils by him, wherein they charged that he had accomplished it through the agency of Beelzebub. Replying to them, he said, "If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you." Matt. 12:27, 28.

Here, again, was a successful effort to put his adversaries on the defensive. He does not try to prove by independent argument that the power by which he worked was from Heaven, but he appeals directly, and in brief, to that which their own children were doing according to their belief. Now, he says in substance, if they do the same work which I am doing, the presumption is that they do it in the use of the same instrumentalities. If, therefore, I am the tool of the devil, they must also be the same. This logic was, of course, unanswerable. But the feature of it to which we wish to call attention especially, is the fact that—for his then present purpose—he seemed to accept, or at least to employ without disputing the same, their profession that members of their party were really successful in exercising evil spirits.

But right here it is submitted that it must be a matter of extreme doubt whether the children, or partisans, of those confronting our Lord—wicked, bigoted, and backslidden as they were—were actually able to expel demons under any circumstances. But if this doubt be justified, then we are furnished with a case precisely in point with the one found in the sixteenth chapter of Luke. The only objection which could be made to the exegesis of that portion of the Scriptures which has been presented in this article, would be raised against the hypothesis that Christ accepted, for the time being, as correct, the pharisaic notions in regard to hades. But in the case before us, the same thing, in effect, occurs unmistakably in the use of the argumentum ad hominem against his vilifiers, if, indeed, as we have supposed, he did, for the purpose of their confusion, employ their convictions in regard to the ability of their children to relieve the unfortunate victims of diabolic possession, when, in fact, they were wholly incapable of working such a deliverance.

But enough. It is now time that this article should be brought to a close. It has been the earnest effort of the writer, in presenting the exegesis which it contains, to free himself from the spirit of partisanship, allowing only such considerations to be presented as were thought to be really pertinent to the issue, and of a nature to commend themselves to candid examination from individuals on either side of the prolonged controversy concerning the state of the dead. For this reason, also, he has endeavored to say what he had to say in this communication without making his own private opinions concerning the intermediate state at all prominent. In fact, it is thought that both the believer and the disbeliever in the natural immortality of man, might unite in approving the exposition herein given of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. To be sure, the former could not thereafter claim to draw from it any support for his own peculiar tenet, but he might insist that outside of the parable he could find in the Scriptures something which would justify his theory of the future life. Be that as it may, however, it has seemed to us that the system of interpretation herein offered is both natural and truthful, and that it at once removes all the difficulties attending the construction generally placed upon that portion of the sacred word which we have had under consideration, leaving it free from all indorsement of Pharisaic errors, and inculcating the grand and simple truth that the poorest and weakest of men, destitute though he may be of food and raiment, covered with sores and dependent upon charity for his daily bread, may, nevertheless, be highly esteemed in Heaven; while at the same time those who are arrayed in fine apparel and fare sumptuously every day, may, after all, be subjects of the divine wrath.