Not to put off converse with God and His children until one should be beautiful.

What this letter is. Written the same day as the fourth letter, to a different sister — one who had been staying away: from God, and from God's children, until she should first be "beautiful enough." The argument-line names the folly with a smile — not to put off converse with God and His children until one should be beautiful — and the letter itself opens with the gentlest possible rebuke: "who has taught you the foolish courtesy?"

Tersteegen will not let her renegotiate her covenant from shame. "Poor child! I know nothing other than that you have long since closed the accord with Jesus: you would be His, and He should be yours" — and in that agreement the parts are fixed. Hers: to love Him and cleave to Him. His: "He should make you free from your sins and from all corruption." So the counsel is pure division of labour: "Do you, then, only attend to your part; Jesus will surely mind His duty too." She is even to look on herself "as a thing that is given to Jesus" — no longer her own property to condemn. The "other, resisting, evil part" in her — the very thing she wanted to make beautiful before showing herself — is precisely what she must not take in hand: "that is offered up to Jesus and His judgment-seat of grace, that He may slay it and root it wholly out in the power of His death. You have nothing to do with it." Her one work is the quiet turning to Jesus; and the old print set the letter's whole point in emphasized type: that all of it "become ever more Jesus' work" — his work, not hers. The close carries an old echo. Augustine's famous word — "Love, and do what you will" — appears here in Tersteegen's own characteristic enlargement: "only love and suffer; for the rest, do what you will." To the love that Augustine made the one rule, Tersteegen adds the suffering that lets God do the working. Then, in haste (so the subscription says — In Eil), the blessing: "I greet you in Jesus — who bless you!"

A few words and echoes.

• The accord. Der Accord — a agreement, compact, covenant; the word of merchants and treaties, used here with a smile for the soul's long-settled covenant with Jesus.
• You would be His, and He should be yours. The German plays on sein — "his" and "to be" — in one breath; the marriage-covenant formula (Song of Solomon 2:16 — "My beloved is mine, and I am his").
• The judgment-seat of grace. Gnaden-Gericht — a tribunal whose sentence against the old self is carried out "in the power of His death"; condemnation and mercy in one court (cf. Romans 8:3, 13).
• Love, and do what you will. Augustine, on the First Epistle of John (7,8): Dilige, et quod vis fac — extended by Tersteegen: love and suffer.
• In haste. The letter's last word before the dateline — dashed off, like the counsel of the second letter, "with a running pen."