Lot's choice of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Esau's purchase of the mess of pottage in the Old Testament; and then Judas's thirty pieces of silver, and Ananias and Sapphira's part of the price in the New Testament, are all so many well-known instances of getting in the hundred and losing in the shire.

And not Esau's and Lot's only, but our own lives also have been full up to to-day of the same fatal transaction.
This house, as our Lord again has it, this farm, this merchandise, this shop, this office, this salary, this honour, this home--all this on the one hand, and then our Lord Himself, His call, His cause, His Church, with everlasting life in the other--when it is set down before us in black and white in that way, the transaction, the proposal, the choice is preposterous, is insane, is absolutely impossible.

But preposterous, insane, absolutely impossible, and all, there it is, in our own lives, in the lives of our sons and daughters, and in the lives of multitudes of other men and other men's sons and daughters besides ours.

Every day you will be taken in, and you will stand by and see other men taken in with the present penny for the future pound: and with the poor pelting hundred under your eye for the full, far-extending, and ever-enriching shire.
Lucifer is always abroad pressing on us in his malice the penny on the spot, for the pound which he keeps out of sight; he dazzles our eyes with the gain of the hundred till we gnash our teeth at the loss of the shire.
'He hath in sooth good cause for endless grief, Who, for the love of thing that lasteth not, Despoils himself for ever of THAT LOVE.' 3.

'What also if we join with those two another two of ours, Mr.Sweet- world and Mr.Present-good, namely, for they are two men full of civility and cunning.