That the straining is to be used not in prayer, but in self-denial.

What this letter is. A short second letter to Johannes Ritterskamp, twelve days after Brief 18 and written while Tersteegen himself was weak from a bloodletting. The brother is anxious about his prayer — it feels forced, and forcing it makes it worse. Tersteegen's answer is a small masterpiece of pastoral realism: the anxiety has "a natural cause," and the cure is to stop straining. The heading states the whole teaching: "the straining is to be used not in prayer, but in self-denial." The brother's anxious effort — Alteration und Aengstlichkeit, agitation and anxiousness — is partly a bodily fact ("a natural cause"), and "aroused and increased by the least straining." So Tersteegen "counsels him off the straining of devotion," even though letting go will make the prayer feel "only perfunctory." The feeling is not the measure.

He does not abolish effort — he relocates it. "Use the true straining and force, which consists in self-denial, in the entire surrender to God, and in the secret union with His divine good-pleasure, both within and outside of prayer." The violence the kingdom suffers (Matthew 11:12) is spent not on working up feelings but on letting go of self. And the gentle alternative to strained devotion: "often remind oneself of the presence of God in a gentle yet truthful way, and remain before Him with a quiet bearing of one's own poverty." Characteristically, the counsel ends with the body: "a moderate exercise, as much namely as your condition or your strength will bear." The print then breaks off with the redactor's ellipsis. He closes with a blessing — that God would make the brother's soul "wholly turned toward Him."

A few words and echoes.

• Bloodletting. Aderlaß — the standard 18th-century remedy; Tersteegen writes weak from his own.
• Agitation and anxiousness. Alteration und Aengstlichkeit — Alteration is a Latinate word (medical/emotional disturbance) which the print sets in the ordinary Fraktur — rendered "agitation."
• The straining. Anstrengung — the letter's keyword, deliberately kept the same word for both the wrong effort (in prayer) and the right one (in self-denial).
• Turning-away. Auskehr — a deliberate turning of the heart outward, away from God; the one thing to avoid.
• Bearing of one's poverty. Ertragung seiner Armuth — to remain before God quietly enduring one's own spiritual emptiness, rather than straining to fill it.
• Self-denial. Verläugnung — where the real "force" belongs; the recurring center of these letters.