For an ordinary leader this would have been enough. But the recent sad occurrences in the matter of Baal-Peor had only too surely reminded Moses of the fickle tendencies of the nation, and none knew better than himself the awful consequences of national apostasy. For the last time, therefore, he assembled the people together and delivered to them his final counsels. Commencing with a retrospect of the past forty years, he reminded them of the _goodness and faithfulness_ which had always followed them, in spite of their murmurings and discontent, and the victories they had been enabled to achieve (Deut. i–iv. 43). He recapitulated the Law given on Mount Sinai, with such additions or modifications as his own enlarged experience suggested (Deut. v. 1–xxvi. 19), and appointed a day, on which, at the conclusion of the conquest, its blessings and curses were to be ratified by the nation with the most imposing and solemn ceremonies (Deut. xxvii.). He then, for the last time, enlarged on the exalted vocation of the nation, and the blessings which would assuredly accompany obedience to the Divine laws, _in the city and the field, in their basket and their store, in their going out and their coming in_, and dwelt with no less earnestness on the terrible punishments which would follow apostasy and transgression, “in furnishing images for which the whole realm of nature was exhausted, and which nothing excepting the real horrors of the Jewish history, the misery of their sieges, the cruelty, the contempt, the oppressions, which for ages this scattered, despised, and detested nation have endured, can approach[140]” (Deut. xxviii.–xxx.).