Christian admonitions to a brotherhood living together.

What this letter is. A short pastoral letter to the little community of younger disciples who lived together in the pilgrim-house on the Otterbeck — Tersteegen's "children." He writes as one of the household ("fellow-householder and brother"), in love but with real anxiety: his fear is not that they will fall into open sin but into the subtler danger of spiritual security — coasting, self-satisfied, no longer knowing the true state of their own souls. His remedy is the whole of his spirituality in miniature: to live every moment before God, "as in the presence of Him who has eyes like flames of fire, who discerns the innermost intentions." From that flows a small rule of life for a shared house — examine your own work (not each other's); keep "the holy and friendly silence"; weigh your words as spoken in God's presence; and above all keep to "your closet and the exercise of prayer," so as to grow from "sensual" into "inward, spiritual" people. The letter's sharp center is a sentence he begs them never to forget: "he among you loves God most who hates himself most" — self-love and love of God rise and fall inversely. And its warmth is in the plaintive question at the heart of it: "When will you gladden God, and when will you gladden my soul?"

A few words and echoes.

• "Eyes like flames of fire." Revelation 2:18 — the risen Christ addressing the church at Thyatira, whose eyes are "like unto a flame of fire," searching the heart; to live "in His presence" is to live under that gaze.
• "Discerns the innermost intentions… brings all that is impure into judgment." 1 Thessalonians 2:4 ("God, which trieth our hearts") and Ecclesiastes 12:14 ("God shall bring every work into judgment… whether it be good, or whether it be evil"); cf. Hebrews 4:12–13.
• "Let each one prove his own work." Galatians 6:4, "let every man prove his own work" — the antidote to comparing and judging one another in a shared household.
• "The holy and friendly silence." Tersteegen's prized discipline of Stillschweigen — an inward and outward quiet that keeps the soul recollected in God; here "commended" to the brothers as a house rule.
• "Your closet and the exercise of prayer." Matthew 6:6, "enter into thy closet, and… pray to thy Father which is in secret" — the hidden prayer that turns "sensual" people into "spiritual" ones (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:14–15).
• "He loves God most who hates himself most." The inverse proportion of self-love and love of God; cf. Luke 14:26 and John 12:25, "he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal."
• "May the mind of Jesus be in every one of us!" Philippians 2:5, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" — the humility of the self-emptying Christ as the one temper the household is to share.