<TITLE>02. Par 7-12</TITLE>L-7   I, in India, I've just went down through the streets, with some money that had been given me by these people, and I changed it from dollars to rupees. And trying to--to pass it out, why, they had to get a militia to get me out of the street; they was stampeding me. And there was poor little women laying there, starving to death. A little baby, and it done starved till the meat was cleaving to the bones, and where you see the little skull put together. And hand you the baby, trying to get you to take the baby so it won't die. If you take this one, what about that one, what about this one, what about...? Oh, my, it's, you--you... If you would see what we rake off in the garbage can here, would feed them people, almost. You just don't realize how well off this country is, when you see the rest of the world starving.

L-8   And it's full of beggars. And this day, as our scene opens, there was a... We find that all these beggars come down, usually, in Jericho, at the north gate, which come down from Jerusalem. Jericho wasn't too rich a city. But Jerusalem, the great self-styled, famous place of the temple, and--and the rich all moved to Jerusalem, and it was a great glamorous city. And the people who came from there were rather wealthy. And the merchants, and so forth, when they would come in, in the daytime, these beggars had their stalls; it's an unwritten law, they knowed just where each one would lay for his, begging for his bread, his alms.

L-9 And they had to get there early when the merchants came in, because maybe the man only helped one beggar a day, had a coin he'd put in his pocket before he left. And, of course, that time, Rome was ruling Palestine, and the currency was Roman denarii. And so they had a--a little coin, he would pitch it to the first beggar, maybe, and that did it for the day. He couldn't afford to--to give to every beggar. So the one that met him first, course, got the coin. So they had their places outside the gates, even before the people got into the city, the tourists, and so forth. And they laid out for that north gate, especially, getting the tourists coming down from there.

L-10   And as we see this morning that we're talking about, the sun beginning to rise up now, about nine o'clock, there was one blind beggar that arrived kind of late.

L-11 He had had a bad night. He was blind. He had been blind since he was a little boy. And he had arrived late. He didn't... He overslept, that morning, because all night long he had been dreaming that he could see again. And he had tossed in his bed. And--and he could see, he thought he could see, and to wake up with this disappointment, that he couldn't see. Really, it was only just a dream.

L-12   And he had made his way down to his place. And when he got there, (now this is a drama now, to get to my point) there was no one there. There was something strange had happened. Yet no more than about nine-thirty or ten o'clock, and--and there was no more beggars there. Usually, every person was at their place. He didn't know what had happened in the city; that we had in our morning breakfast this morning, and talked about. Jesus had entered from the gate and had went into the city, and--and many people had went in to find out what it was all about, and the beggars had gone. And he didn't know this, arriving late. So we could see him as he begins to call different names, and there's--there's nobody there. Kind of a lonesome affair. He wondered, well, maybe the--the Roman officers might have run them off of the place, or something. So he heard nobody, so he... It was kind of chilly, and he was ragged and his clothes was pretty well worn out.


<A HREF="P3">Next Page</A>