That no one is good but the one God alone; but man is throughout misery and self-hood.

The Sixty-Eighth Letter.

That no one is good but the one God alone; but man is throughout misery and self-hood.

Most worthy Lady Countess!

After the high calling of grace, dearly beloved sister!

Although I am weak and faint in body (whereof more particularly reported to D. C.), yet love constrained me to testify with a few lines that the most worthy Countess's letter of the 8th of November last year was right refreshing to me, and has often been answered by me in spirit.

God be praised, who has given us communion in Christ with Him, and with one another, without and against all our merit! Now, and as often as the Lord reminds me of it, I desire — as a poor man — to take from the so near and open fulness of God, wishing the most worthy sister, for a greeting, all furtherance in the life of God and all delight in this blessed God of love. I look, too, at all times for such a reaching-out of the spirit from the most worthy Countess.

The longer I live, the more I see and experience it, that no one is good but the one God alone. What He is in us, and what He does in us, that alone makes us holy and blessed. Men see and heed what is outward and gross, what has a show; but their judgment is seldom according to the truth, because the fewest works are done in God. God has indeed infinite patience with us in our mixed being; yet it is a gross error when one still sees something good anywhere outside of God — one is not yet in the truth. We must make room for God — or, better said, God must make room for Himself in us; for our misery is so great that when we escape ourselves in one place, we find ourselves again, in this very respect, in another. We are throughout misery and self-hood; no adorning nor further adorning helps; the whole mass is worthless; we must be led out of ourselves, through God, into God. There is none good but the one God; and whoever truly sinks himself into Him and loses himself, he is made good through Him, were he otherwise ever so evil.

Ah, that all poor sinners might see, with us, this sea of infinite goodness, so near and opened in Jesus! How would they cast themselves into it, and all their hurt be healed! But so it is: many a one must yet, feeling himself, complain sorrowfully:

How weary am I of myself! and must yet carry myself still. One cries: Go out of thyself! — but I cannot find the door.

Yet this is just the point: whoever has not rightly felt himself, has not rightly gone out of himself. One must learn by experience that one cannot, so that in this respect too the glory may be given to God. God will and must heal and hallow us through Himself, but not without need. This is, in my judgment, the ground of the true but rare surrender and passivity, whither surely no one attains without need and dying — though it is a spring of life and of divine peace. Ah God! when shall we no longer stand in Thy way and our own? And when wilt Thou be [it] wholly in us, yea, all in all? Be it so eternally, Amen!

I will not excuse myself; I write simply, as it comes into the pen. Once more I desire, in Jesus' name, to greet the most worthy Countess and the whole high-comital family, and remain, through grace,

The most worthy Countess's

weak fellow-brother.

German

Der achtundsechzigste Brief.

Daß niemand gut ist, denn der einige GOtt; der Mensch aber durchaus Elend und Eigenheit.

Wertheste Frau Gräfin!

Nach dem hohen Beruf der Gnade vielgeliebte Schwester! Wiewohl ich schwach und matt bin dem Leibe nach (wovon umständlicher an D. C. berichtet), so drunge mich doch die Liebe, mit einigen Zeilen zu bezeugen, daß der werthesten Frau Gräfin Schreiben vom 8. November vorigen Jahrs mir recht erquicklich gewesen und öfters von mir im Geist beantwortet worden.

— Opening lines of the original German. The complete transcription of all 605 letters appears in the forthcoming Encounter Press critical edition; Brief 1 is shown in full as a sample.

German text: public domain (1773–75 first edition / 1845 Gesammelte Schriften).