Comforting encouragement and instruction to a sick person, in case it should come to dying.

What this letter is. The last of the four letters to Anna Maria Elisabeth Schmitz (see the forty-sixth, fifty-first, and fifty-second), written a month after the fifty-second when her brother — probably Johann Peter Schmitz — had sent word that she was very ill. Where the fifty-second still said "you will not die, but live," this one is written squarely for the case that she might. It is, quietly, one of Tersteegen's finest deathbed letters: unsentimental, exact about suffering, and wholly unafraid. He will not pretend the illness is small. "I can well imagine that the distress of poor nature bears hard." But he sets it at once inside a single governing image — the assayer's furnace: "The dross is only to be separated out and consumed: the Lord, who does the smelting, will keep His gold carefully, to make of it a vessel of His honor." It is the picture of Malachi 3 and of Romans 9 fused — God as the refiner who watches His metal, and as the potter who forms an honorable vessel. Hence the counsel about the fever itself: "Do not let the heat dismay you; it must be so — Love does it." The heat is not against her; it is Love's own work, and one day, seeing that work finished, "we shall kiss the hands of this eternal Love."

The center of the letter turns dying inside out. There is, he says, "nothing more for you here but only cross" — and to carry that cross in Christ's love is already "grace and glory." So if death comes, it comes as an invitation, in the words of the parable: "if the Lord says, 'It is enough, come now home, and enter into your joy!'" — why then should she not be content? He asks her to "entrust her soul in peace to the faithful Creator," and to let go completely: "Only let yourself go, so nakedly and blindly, and fall into the sweet eternity, where the fatherly bosom of the eternal love of God in Jesus will take you up." The nakedness is the point: nothing of her own to cling to, "so that Jesus alone may have the honor of your redemption." And the letter does not end on death but on the Lamb. It breaks into a full ascription of praise — "Honor, praise, and thanks, and unending adoration be to our God and to the Lamb, who has bought us so dearly with His blood" — the language of Revelation 5, redemption purchased and eternity spent magnifying "the wonders of His grace." His last word to her is a greeting across the possible parting: "If we do not see one another again in this present time, then it will come to pass there." He signs himself, more simply than usual, her "bound brother."

A few words and echoes.

• your brother. Probably Johann Peter Schmitz, who had written to Tersteegen of her illness (Benrath ¹).
• the distress of poor nature. Benautheit — oppression, shortness of breath.
• the Lord, who does the smelting… a vessel of His honor. Malachi 3:3 — "he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver"; Romans 9:21 — "to make one vessel unto honour" (cf. 1 Peter 1:7, gold tried by fire).
• a whole burnt offering. Romans 12:1 — "present your bodies a living sacrifice."
• entrust our soul… to the faithful Creator. 1 Peter 4:19 — "commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator."
• It is enough, come now home, and enter into your joy. Matthew 25:21 — "enter thou into the joy of thy lord" ("It is enough" echoes the dismissal of the finished task).
• the fatherly bosom… in Jesus. John 1:18 — the Son "which is in the bosom of the Father."
• the Lamb, who has bought us so dearly with His blood. Revelation 5:9 — "thou… hast redeemed us to God by thy blood" (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:20).