LIVING
God, and got to believe that God was with their forefathers, but is
not with them. A Jew of the time of the Apocrypha, or of the time
of our Lord, might have done such a thing, because he had lost faith
in the living God; but then his work would have been of a very
different kind from this noble and heart-stirring book. For the
pith and marrow, the essence and life of Deuteronomy is, that it is
full of faith in the living God; and for that very reason I am going
to speak to you to-day.

For the rest, whether Moses wrote the book down, and put it together
in the shape in which we now have it, we shall never be able to
tell. The several orations may have been put together into one
book. Alterations may have crept in by the carelessness of copiers;
sentences may have been added to it by later prophets--as, of
course, the grand account of Moses' death, which probably was at
first the beginning of the book of Joshua. And beyond that we need
know nothing--even if we need know that.

There the book is; and people, if they be wise, will, instead of
trying to pick it to pieces, read and study it in fear and
trembling, that the curses pronounced in it may NOT come, and the
blessings pronounced in it may come upon this English land.

Now these Jews were to worship and obey Jehovah, the one true God,
and him only. And why?

Why, indeed? You MUST understand why, or you will never understand
this book of Deuteronomy or any part of the Old Testament, and if
you do not, then you will understand very little, if anything, of
the New.

You must understand that this was not to be a mere matter of
RELIGION with the old Jews, this trusting and obeying the true God.
Indeed, the word religion, so far as I know, is never mentioned once
in the Old Testament at all. By religion we now mean some plan of
believing and obeying God, which will save our souls after we die.
But Moses said nothing to the Jews about that. He never even
anywhere told them that they would live again after this life. We
do not know the reason of that. But we may suppose that he knew
best. And as we believe that God sent him, we must believe that God
knew best also; and that he thought it good for these Jews not to be
told too much about the next life; perhaps for fear that they should
forget that God was the living God; the God of now, as well as of
hereafter; the God of this life, as well as of the life to come. My
friends, I sometimes think we