Wherefore to our full knowledge and sight we are in, and live in, more than Egyptian darkness. For though all things around us remind us of the wrath of God continually, and are all but so many pricks in our eyes of admonition, we not only do not regard that wrath, but embrace this life and enjoy it as our only delight. In the same proportion therefore as sins are multiplied, and self-security increases, and men grow callous and insensible under their punishments, so those punishments themselves are multiplied, not only in this life but in that which is to come. I am here speaking of the wicked in this world. For if it were possible that men, when in hell, could possibly endure their punishments and torments in sensation only, without the consciousness at the same time that the punishments which they endured were just, such ignorance would render their torments more easy to be endured. Just in the same way as we on earth will not acknowledge our punishments, and thus we harden ourselves as it were against grief. But in hell that insensibility which now prevents us from seeing our real misery will be wholly taken away, and all the doors of our senses will be unlocked, so that we shall not only feel the pains of our punishment in our body, but our mind itself will be filled with a sense of the wrath of God and with the confession that we have deserved the whole of that wrath by our wickedness. These are the feelings that will sharpen, and in an inconceivable degree augment the future torments of the wicked. V. 18a. _"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee."_ Here we are again reminded that the earth of itself brought forth no such thing; but only on account of the sin of Adam, as Moses had before expressly said, "For thy sake." Wherefore as often as we see thorns and thistles; as often as we behold tares and other noxious weeds growing in our fields and in our garden, so often are we reminded as by certain signs of sin and the wrath of God. Wherefore it is not only in churches that we hear ourselves accused of sin; every garden, every field and almost the whole creation is filled with such preachers and such monitors of our sin and of the wrath of God, which is brought down upon us on account of that sin. Wherefore all prayer to the Lord is necessary that he would take away from our eyes and from our hearts this marvelous insensibility; that being thus perpetually reminded of our sin, we may at length put off our self-security and walk in the fear of God. For by these various evidences of the curse of God, we are continually met, cast down and overwhelmed. This Moses will now still more extensively set before us. He next says: V. 18b. _And thou shalt eat the herb of the field._