Grace works both things: the cleansing from evil and the imparting of the good in us. What is to be done about harmful self-will and self-activity.

What this letter is. A letter to an apprentice. Johann Adam Bersinger was a young man away from home learning a trade — a small retailer's business — and he had written in October with news of his health and a confession about himself. Tersteegen writes back seven weeks later, and the whole letter is built on one sentence of the young man's own, quoted straight back at him. In the old print that sentence is set in heavier type, so Bersinger would have opened the book and seen his own words standing out on the page.

Both hands of grace. The heading states the argument: grace works both things — it cleanses from evil and it imparts the good — and the letter's business is to get the young man to consent to the first as well as the second. "Because this grace works in us in a twofold manner — partly by the uncovering of evil and the cleansing from it, partly by the imparting of the good and union with the highest good — we must take our good pleasure in this too, and be willing to give room to this twofold labor of grace." That is the argument's whole weight: room. The word appears twice, first of the young man's own willingness ("you gladly wish to give it fuller room") and then of the harder half. And the reason offered is not that the painful half is bearable but that it is not a different thing: "for it is all grace, and it aims at our thorough and eternal salvation."

"As it were." Then the quoted sentence: self-willing and self-activity are, as it were, inborn in you. Tersteegen seizes on the hedge. "It is true, my brother — of that stuff there is surely more inborn in you and me than that, and not merely as it were inborn." He will not let the young man soften it, and he refuses the softening by including himself. But the sentence turns: "to recognize such things as evil, and to long for deliverance from them, that is not inborn in us, but is from grace." The very self-knowledge that made Bersinger write the confession is itself the evidence he was looking for. Nothing native is being praised and nothing native is being condemned; the distinction is between what we came with and what has been given.

With that thief. The counsel that follows is the letter's finest passage. Our inborn qualities have served us "for pleasure and for the false life" — so let them henceforth serve us "for cross and for death." And then, hanging on that cross, we are to think along with the man crucified beside Christ: We suffer what our deeds are worth. But not for long — "let us not detain ourselves long at the sight and the feeling of evil." The point of self-knowledge is never to dwell in it. Turn instead to the Savior, and here Tersteegen slips in the consolation the whole letter has been walking toward: He is "nearer to us still than He was to him." The thief had Christ at arm's length on the next cross; we have Him nearer than that. And so the prayer that the thief prayed becomes ours to pray — Lord, remember me! — with the writer and reader as its speakers. "All our misery is only to help us forth out of ourselves."

The shop. The close comes down to earth without changing key. He is glad the trade is going well, and gladder that it offers "opportunity for the dying away of the vain life" — a counter's worth of small humiliations being safer, he says, than opportunities for enticement into vanities. One condition: "let corrupt nature, together with all its lofty and stiff-necked mind, be hazarded in the process." Stake the proud self and lose it, and follow Jesus with closed eyes in His unsightly form. Then the promise, which is the largest sentence in a small letter: "Out of such humiliations nothing but glory is born, according to the inner man." He signs himself not brother but fellow brother, and weak.

A few words and echoes.

• your kind letter. Dein Angenehmes — the merchant's epistolary formula, and apt: he is writing to a shopkeeper's apprentice in the language of the counting-house.
• the God who is so kind toward men. Der leutselige GOtt — the word for God's affability toward people; the older English "condescension," before that word soured.
• Jesus Immanuel. The two names run together as one: the Savior and the God-with-us, "so intimately near."
• torment. Quaal — paired with Uebel so that the phrase carries the Lord's Prayer's own "deliver us from evil."
• so entirely. So gar — the old sense, "wholly," not the modern "even": everything hangs so wholly on grace's working "that hardly a soul can believe it to be as it truly is."
• room. Raum lassen — the letter's key word, used first of the good and then, harder, of the purging.
• that stuff. Des Zeugs — deliberately offhand, and the only colloquialism in the letter.
• for pleasure and for the false life. Zur Lust und falschen Leben — what our native qualities have been for; the answering clause makes them serve "for cross and for death" instead.
• henceforth. Hinführo — an old word, and the hinge of the sentence.
• that thief. Jener Schächer — the crucified robber who asked to be remembered; Tersteegen does not name him and does not need to.
• We suffer what our deeds are worth. His own wording, sharper than the gospel's "we receive the due reward of our deeds" — suffer, not receive.
• the sight and the feeling of evil. Gesicht und Gefühl — seeing it and feeling it: both real, neither a place to stay.
• nearer to us still than He was to him. The letter's quiet argument for confidence: the thief's advantage was proximity, and ours is greater.
• sink into our salvation. Ersinken — to let oneself go down into; and the salvation is near, the same nearness as the name at the letter's opening.
• the dying away of the vain life. Absterbung — not mortification as a discipline but a gradual dying-off, offered by an ordinary working day.
• be hazarded. Gewaget — staked, risked, put up to be lost: the proud mind is what you wager.
• according to the inner man. Paul's phrase; the glory is real and it is interior.
• fellow brother. Mitbruder — not brother simply. He is walking beside the apprentice, and calls himself weak in the same breath.