<TITLE>05. Par 18-19</TITLE>L-18 Let's imagine as we... Let's take it at a drama affair. And let's imagine that the sun is going down. It's after three o'clock in the afternoon, perhaps. And the great high walls of Jericho...
Why, this blind man is crunched down along the side of these walls. And he's--he was a beggar, we're told. And his name was blind... His name was Bartimaeus. Many of you pronounce it Bartimaeus. Either way would be all right. And he was... His odds... Perhaps he had a lot of difficult making a living. And we're taught by historians that he was a married man, had a family. But he had a hard time making a living because he begged, and there was lots of beggars in them days.
There was... Lepers was beggars. Oh, that horrible plague of leprosy, no one hardly can pass by it without having a funny feeling.
I've seen them. I used to think that leprosy was contagious, that you could catch it. But you can't catch leprosy one from another. I've hugged them and kissed them, and everything else. So you can't catch leprosy from one another. It's a... It's caused by a diet.
And I've had lepers with nothing but just pegs for arms like that, wadding their little pegs around, trying to hug me in the prayer line and things. Poor old women on the streets and... Sometime leprosy eat toes till they just stand up like a big wart, about that big, real white. But just... Oh, horrible-looking sights of leprosy. What a horrible thing it is to have. Medical science has no remedy for it yet. And it's a very horrible thing. Not a painful thing, but it's a... It's so pathetic to see someone that's got their hands dropped off and so forth, and maybe part of their face and their ears eat off with leprosy. And it's white-looking, very horrible sight.
And there was many lepers in those days, and they... The people would have to come out of a morning. Maybe a man who could afford to give a man a coin, maybe he... The first man he met, he give him a coin. That settled it for the day. He couldn't give every one, because beggars were on every hand: blind beggars, and lame bleggar--beggars, and there were lepers, and all kinds of afflictions that just laid around begging. That was the scenes that our Lord saw while He was here on earth.

L-19 In the oriental, in the orients, rather, it hasn't changed very much. I've been in the orient, and see the astrologers, the wise men, set on the street, gazing up. And just about like it was when Jesus came; still wearing their loin cloth and turbans on their heads and so forth, always inquisitive, and wanting to ask questions, and talk about supernatural things, and so forth.
And so, this poor old blind man, setting there, perhaps in the fall of the year and maybe he was wondering how he was ever going to get his winter's money. And it gets pretty cool down there.
And he was setting by the side of the road begging. Maybe he'd eat today, and tomorrow he couldn't eat. Maybe the next day he couldn't eat, and then get enough together again.
I remember in Bombay... I will never forget when we got in there. There was Bombay, India; a really a needy place. You know that they just got their freedom back by bankruptcy a few... about five or six years ago.


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