I tell you the world is a liar; it does not keep its promises.  It is a cheat, and it fleeces everything it can put its hands on.  It is a bogus world.  It is a six-thousand-year-old swindle.  Even if it pays the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for which you contracted, it pays them in bonds that will not be worth anything in a little while.  Just as a man may pay down ten thousand dollars in hard cash and get for it worthless scrip—­so the world passes over to you the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in that shape which will not be worth a farthing to you a thousandth part of a second after you are dead.  “Oh,” you say, “it will help to bury me, anyhow.”  Oh, my brother! you need not worry about that.  The world will bury you soon enough, from sanitary considerations.  After you have been deceased for three or four days you will compel the world to bury you.

Post-mortem emoluments are of no use to you.  The treasures of this world will not pass current in the future world; and if all the wealth of the Bank of England were put in the pocket of your shroud, and you in the midst of the Jordan of death were asked to pay three cents for your ferriage, you could not do it.  There comes a moment in your existence beyond which all earthly values fail; and many a man has wakened up in such a time to find that he has sold out for eternity, and has nothing to show for it.  I should as soon think of going to Chatham Street to buy silk pocket-handkerchiefs with no cotton in them, as to go to this world expecting to find any permanent happiness.  It has deceived and deluded every man that has ever put his trust in it.

History tells us of one who resolved that he would have all his senses gratified at one and the same time, and he expended thousands of dollars on each sense.  He entered a room, and there were the first musicians of the land pleasing his ear, and there were fine pictures fascinating his eye, and there were costly aromatics regaling his nostril, and there were the richest meats, and wines, and fruits, and confections pleasing the appetite, and there was a soft couch of sinful indulgence on which he reclined; and the man declared afterward that he would give ten times what he had given if he could have one week of such enjoyment, even though he lost his soul by it.  Ah! that was the rub.  He did lose his soul by it!  Cyrus the Conqueror thought for a little while that he was making a fine thing out of this world, and yet before he came to his grave he wrote out this pitiful epitaph for his monument:  “I am Cyrus.  I occupied the Persian Empire.  I was king over Asia.  Begrudge me not this monument.”  But the world in after years plowed up his sepulcher.