natural that the good man should feel comforted and the bad man should
feel tormented.

Only more so. Only more so. That is the difference. The poor humble
follower of Christ, even on earth, is in the main happy--at his best
moments. But he is not always very happy. He has the inner comfort of
the peace of God. But there is much worry and distraction, about his
business and his sickness and his troubles of many kinds to spoil his
peace. All these earthly troubles are gone now. He sees Christ. He
knows of the boundless joy before him by and by. He is comforted.

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.

Section 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 child