Page:Memoirs of a Huguenot Family.djvu/328

 320 him with one heart and with one mouth? When the fire and the sword, death and destruction stared us in the face, we would have been glad to compound for many days of hard and difficult service ; nay, had God desired some great thing of us that we should have remembered these deliverances daily, we should not have thought it hard. But perhaps time, which consumes and devours every thing, hath blotted these mercies out of our minds and memories; or, our powerful Protector hath shortened his arm on some occasions since, and hath not proved the same God still, to save and deliver. No; surely it can be neither the one nor the other of these, for it is but nineteen years since the first, and fourteen since the last happened; and his wonders have been manifested sundry times since.

This neglect in some measure proceeds from the same infatuation which possessed the Israelites formerly, when God by his prophet Hosea reprimands them for their slothfulness and inconstancy. "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? for your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away." God's favors are showered upon us abundantly, I may say, as the dew of the morning; but to what purpose, if we are unmindful of them, and suffer the cares of the world to stifle our gratitude? Can we be so unreasonable as to imagine that he will for ever give, if we continue to forget?

Common blessings, such as he dispenseth to just and unjust, he will not, perhaps, deprive us of. He will not make our inheritance dry, while he watereth that of our neighbor. But are these the only blessings we stand indebted for? Are these such as gave rise to the solemnity of this day in particular? Are we favored with no other distinguishing marks of his kind Providence and goodness? What, then, mean those