The benefit of brotherly love. The walk before God alone is essential; all else is mere dreaming.

What this letter is. A warm, brief letter to a brother, dashed off when a "good opportunity" to send word arose, just after the two had "once more seen one another in this mortality." Tersteegen gives thanks for that reunion — "though all is frail, yet it is still refreshing when, as brothers, one may dwell harmoniously together" — recalling the psalm's promise that where brothers dwell in concord "the Lord commands blessing, always and forevermore." His deepest wish is that "the Lord may be essentially present in your midst — yea, in each one's heart"; and he notes, movingly, that God wishes this "yet infinitely more heartily" than they do, "for to that end He created us, and again redeemed and called us, that He might… dwell with us." Then the letter turns to its title theme: waking versus dreaming. We are not to "dream and rave any longer with the poor world," lost in "the distraction in sense and reason," where something "beautiful and pleasing" turns out, "when one awakens," to have been "a vanity, an image, a shadow." He includes himself in the indictment — "Ah! how often do I find myself thus in a dream!" The cure is to keep "the old commandment which we have heard from the beginning": to "love God and cleave to Him with the whole heart, and in Him to love one another in simplicity." Against everyone's appetite for "something new, something high and great," he sets the childlike constancy of "abiding-within with God," which "shall never grow old." It closes with a homeward cry — "for He is it altogether, and apart from Him all is dream and foam. So bring us, O Lord! back to Thee, that we may come home!" — sealed by a small four-line verse on time "squandered" away from God.

A few words and echoes.

• The blessing on concord. His joy in brotherly fellowship rests on Psalm 133 — where brethren "dwell together in unity," "there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore." Human friendship, rightly held, is a place God blesses.
• Dream and foam. The letter's governing contrast is waking versus dreaming: the world's beauties, pursued apart from God, prove "a vanity, an image, a shadow" — "dream and foam" (his own rhyme, Traum und Schaum). To be "awake" is simply to be "with God in the heart."
• The old commandment. Against the craving for novelty — "something new, something high and great" — he sets "the old commandment… from the beginning" (1 John 2:7): to love God wholly and one another simply. Maturity, for him, is not advancing past this but sinking deeper into it.
• Abiding that never grows old. His phrase "abiding-within with God" (Innebleiben) names the contemplative heart of the letter — a dwelling in God that, unlike novelty, "shall never grow old" but yields "ever more depths of wisdom, truth, and blessedness."
• Come home. The closing prayer — "bring us… back to Thee, that we may come home" — and the little verse cast the whole Christian life as homesickness for God: any time not "spent with Him" is time "squandered, as though he had been dreaming."