A consoling farewell to a sick brother, unto blessed eternity.

What this letter is. The most affecting letter of this run: a farewell written to a dying man. Wilhelm Weck — the brother to whom Tersteegen had written the great letter on the "unforgivable sin" (the forty-first) — had fallen ill with typhus, and word reached Tersteegen that his life was in danger. Not knowing whether the letter would arrive in time — "whether this letter will still find you in the mortal life" — he writes a few sentences that are less counsel than a laying of the dying man into God's hands.

The whole letter is one motion: away from self, into God. "Lose yourself, with trust, in the wide bosom of the eternal love of God in Jesus, and let Him deal with you, be it toward life or toward death." The image is of a fall into an embrace: "let yourself fall in, wholly stripped, into the arms that were nailed to the cross for you, and that still stand open in love for you." Death and life are made equal in that surrender — whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. The consolation Tersteegen offers is deliberately not the comfort of a good conscience. He takes it away, in fact, and gives something better: "For the sake of your holiness the Lord will not be gracious to you — that is certain; but I know that He has loved you, and will carry it through gloriously." Against our nothingness ("we are nothing… guilty… abominable") he sets only "the goodness of our God," figured as "an unfathomable sea" that "surrounds, preserves, nourishes, and swallows us up." That sea is the one thing trust can rest on; and it is the sea he prays may "enclose and swallow you up too, when you die."

The close is a benediction and a commendation: "go hence in peace… behold, love, praise, and worship the God who has loved us — before whose face we shall (as I humbly hope) soon meet again." He lays Weck "down into the open arms of Jesus, who is near to you," with a word that his community's prayers go with him — "we do not forget you" — and signs himself with a phrase that quietly refuses the finality of death: "I remain, here and above, your devoted, weak brother." Here and above — bound to him on both sides of dying.

A few words and echoes.

• this very moment I hear of your illness. Den Augenblick — just now, this instant; the subject "I" is left unspoken in the German.
• whether this letter will still find you in the mortal life. Benrath supplies "letter" for the bare dieses, and glosses Sterblichkeit as "the temporal, earthly life."
• be it toward life or toward death. Romans 14:8 — "whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's."
• the Lord will not be gracious to you for the sake of your holiness. The Protestant nerve of the whole: favor rests on His love, not our merit — Ephesians 2:8–9; Titus 3:5.
• an unfathomable sea… surrounds… nourishes, and swallows us up. Tersteegen's own figure for the immensity of God's goodness, in which the creature is at once kept and lost — the Meer der Gottheit of the mystical tradition; the "in Him we live, and move, and have our being" of Acts 17:28.
• here and above. hier und droben — on earth and in heaven; the fellowship the letter refuses to let death break.