they receive what they give themselves for.

There are some of you who know how much what you call enjoyment has
cost you. Some of us have bought pleasure at the price of innocence,
of moral dignity, of stained memories, of polluted imaginations, of an
incapacity to rise above the flesh: and some of us have bought it at
the price of health. The world has a way of getting more out of you
than it gives to you.

At the best, if you are not Christian men and women, whether you are
men of business, votaries of pleasure, seekers after culture and
refinement or anything else, you have given Heaven to get earth. Is
that a good bargain? Is it much wiser than that of a horde of naked
savages that sell a great tract of fair country, with gold-bearing
reefs in it, for a bottle of rum, and a yard or two of calico? What is
the difference? You have been fooled out of the inheritance which God
meant for you; and you have got for it transient satisfaction, and
partial as it is transient. If you are not Christian people, you have
to buy this world's wealth and goods at the price of God and of your
own souls. And I ask you if that is an investment which recommends
itself to your common sense. Oh! my brother; 'what shall it profit a
man if he gain the whole world, and lose himself?' Answer the
question.

III. Lastly, we may gather from this story an illustration of the
fatal falsehood of the world's help.

Ahaz pauperised himself to buy the hireling swords of Assyria, and he
got them; but, as it says in the narrative, 'the king came unto him,
and distressed him, but strengthened him not.' He helped Ahaz at