SHORT HELPS

TO

DAILY DEVOTION,

SELECTED AND ARRANGED

For every Bay in the Year.

BY THE REV.

THOMAS KERCHEVER ARNOLD, M.A.

RECTOR OF LYNDON,

AND LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, ČAMBRIDGE.

LONDON:

FRANCIS & JOHN RIVINGTON,

ST. PAUL'S CHURCH YARD, AND WATERLOO PLACE.

SHORT HELPS TO DAILY DEVOTION.

JANUARY 1.

CIRCUMCISION.

E. L. DEUT. X. ver. 12. COL. ii.

M. L. GEN. xvii. ROM. ii. Ir has pleased the infinite goodness of GOD to satisfy all our inquiries about the nature of man, and the nature of the world in which he is placed, by a revelation made to the world by his Son JESUS CHRIST.

It gives us right and satisfactory notions of ourselves, of our true good and real evil; it shows us the true state of our condition, both our vanity and excellence, our greatness and meanness, our felicity and misery.

Before this, man was a mere riddle to himself, and his condition full of darkness and perplexity: a restless inhabitant of a miserable disordered world, walking in a vain shadow, and disquieting himself in vain.

But this light has dispersed all the anxiety of his vain conjectures; it has brought us acquainted with GOD, and by adding heaven to earth, and eternity to time, has opened such a glorious view of things, as makes man, even in his present condition, full of a peace of GoD which passes all understanding.

This revelation acquaints us, that we have a spirit within us that was created after the divine image, that this spirit is now in a fallen corrupt condition, that the body in which it is placed, is its grave or sepulchre, where it is enslaved to fleshly thoughts, blinded with false notions of good and evil, and dead to all taste and relish of its true happiness.

B