Sermons on Deuteronomy
the covenant which he had sworn to your fathers, as appears this day.
19. But if you forget the Lord your God, and walk after strange Gods and serve them, and bow down before them: I protest to you this day that you shall surely perish.
20. As the Lord destroys the Nations before you: so shall you perish, because you have not obeyed the voice of the Lord your God.
Here we must go forward still with the matter which Moses had touched before, and which I have partly expounded already: which is that he tells the people what favor had been showed them in Gods delivering o them from the bondage of Egypt, and in his leading of them through the wilderness, which things were not done but of Gods wonderful goodness. For when we have been in adversity, and God has delivered us from it, and done us good: his mercy has the greater beauty, and becomes the better known to us, if the adversity be set before us again, and that we be put in mind of it. That then is the meaning of Moses. To the intent that the people should not fall asleep in their pleasures, he says to them, consider in what plight and taking you were, when God reached you his hand to succor you.
Consider by what means he brought you into this land where he gives you rest at this time. Be mindful of those things, and you shall have cause to say that you have found so great mercy, as there is no excuse for you if you forget it. And he speaks purposely of the Manna, not to the same end that he spoke to it a while ago: but to do the people to understand, that they had been fed after such a strange fashion, as