The disfigured invalid, putting down the pieces of broken saucer with which he had been rubbing his arms, with swollen eyelids looks up and says to his garrulous friends in substance, “The most wicked people sometimes have the best health and are the most prospered,” and then in that connection hurls the question which every man and woman has asked in some juncture of affairs, “Wherefore do the wicked live?”

They build up fortunes that overshadow the earth.  They confound all the life-insurance tables on the subject of longevity, dying octogenarians, perhaps nonagenarians, possibly centenarians.  Ahab in the palace, Naboth in the cabinet.  Unclean Herod on the throne, consecrated Paul twisting ropes for tent-making.  Manasseh, the worst of all the kings of Juda, living longer than any of them.  While the general rule is the wicked do not live out half their days, there are exceptions where they live on to great age and in a Paradise of beauty and luxuriance, and die with a whole college of physicians expending its skill in trying further prolongation of life, and have a funeral with casket under mountain of calla-lilies, the finest equipages of the city jingling and flashing into line, the poor, angle-worm of the dust carried out to its hole in the ground with the pomp that might make a spirit from some other world suppose that the Archangel Michael was dead.

Go up among the finest residences of the city, and on some of the door-plates you will find the names of those mightiest for commercial and social iniquity.  They are the vampires of society—­they are the gorgons of the century.  Some of these men have each wheel of their carriage a juggernaut wet with the blood of those sacrificed to their avarice.  Some of them are like Caligula, who wished that all the people had only one neck that he might strike it off at one blow.  Oh, the slain, the slain!  A long procession of usurers and libertines and infamous quacks and legal charlatans and world-grabbing monsters.  What apostleship of despoliation!  Demons incarnate.  Hundreds of men concentering all their energies of body, mind, and soul in one prolonged, ever-intensifying, and unrelenting effort to scald and scarify and blast and consume the world.  I do not blame you for asking me the quivering, throbbing, burning, resounding, appalling question of my text, “Wherefore do the wicked live?”

In the first place, they live to demonstrate beyond all controversy the long-suffering patience of God.  You sometimes say, under some great affront, “I will not stand it;” but perhaps you are compelled to stand it.  God, with all the batteries of omnipotence loaded with thunderbolts, stands it century after century.  I have no doubt sometimes an angel comes to Him and suggests, “Now is the time to strike.”  “No,” says God; “wait a year, wait twenty years, wait a century, wait five centuries.”  What God does is not so wonderful as what He does not do.  He has the reserve corps with which He