A brotherly letter of awakening and encouragement.

What this letter is. A New Year letter, written on 13 January 1747 to two men at once — the salutation is "Dearly beloved Brethren!" — and meant to be passed round further still, since it ends by asking that it count as written "to him also, and to other acquaintances." It is a circular in the old sense: news, warning, encouragement and prayer-requests folded into one sheet, to be read aloud in a room. Three people in it are named only by an initial, and a fourth is not named at all.

Not a lesson. He begins by refusing the position of teacher. "I do not presume to teach you, since you yourselves know the truth by longer experience. I only remind you, as one who has himself so often slipped, to shun the slippery places along with me." That last phrase — along with me — is not politeness. It sets the whole letter in the first person plural, and every warning that follows is one he is issuing to himself in their hearing.

The wise virgins. The warning, when it comes, is a quotation with a small and deliberate alteration in it. He writes: "While the bridegroom tarried, the wise virgins also grew drowsy." In the parable, it is all of them who slumber. Tersteegen narrows it to the wise, which is the only version of the sentence that could apply to the men he is writing to — and then immediately withdraws the application: "Not that I would apply this to you — far be it!" The danger he has in view is precisely not scandal or apostasy. It is the slow settling of people who have been known as serious Christians for so long that the reputation begins to do the work. "It must not enter our minds that we are advanced Christians: by no means!"

What may be left, and what may not. There is a fine distinction in the middle of the paragraph that is easy to read past. He asks that they not "in any point leave the first love, but only the frailty that was in the first love." The first love is to be kept; only what was fragile and beginner's about it is to be outgrown. That is the opposite of the usual maturity story, and it is why the next sentence insists that truth, service and love "must never grow old."

The cloud. The letter's centre is a picture from the wilderness books, and he tells you where to find it: Numbers 9, from verse 17 "to the end thereof." Israel in the desert moved when the cloud over the tabernacle moved and stayed while it stayed, and the phrase for that obedience is "they kept the charge of the LORD." Tersteegen takes the whole apparatus over: keep the charge of the Lord "in true prayer of the heart," keep the cloud in your eye — and then he says what the cloud is: "the kindly, holy presence of God." Travel by it and not by your own mind. The image also decides the last sentence of the letter, where he asks that the new converts be watered and covered — which is what the cloud does over the tabernacle in the same chapter.

Turning outward. One clause carries the practical warning: that we take heed not to "turn outward too much" — with the parenthesis "(even under a good pretext)" set right in the middle of it. The danger is not dissipation; the danger is good and useful activity, spiritual activity included, that runs a person out of themselves. It is the recurring anxiety of Tersteegen's whole correspondence, and here it is compressed into eight words.

The sick woman. Then the letter turns to particulars, and the tone changes. Someone's little letter has arrived; someone else, unnamed, is very ill. "Especially did the heavy way of the cross by which that unnamed patient is being led go to my heart." He asks that her suffering be not removed but sanctified — "sanctify it upon her soul" — and offers a figure that turns on the wedding at Cana: that God's presence is that "whereby all that is bitter can be turned into wholesome medicine, and all the water of tears into the wine of joy." He has told others about her so that they can pray too, and he greets her though he has never met her, and greets the friend who is nursing her. The paragraph then stops at a printer's rule, which is where the eighteenth-century editor cut something out.

Winter. The last paragraph is a report from home, and it is four sentences of plain news: two of the circle died last year; the number has not gone down; some young people have lately been awakened, "which little flowers have a fair appearance, though it be winter." It was in fact January. Then the request, which is what he wants from them in return for all the rest: "Pray with us, that the Lord would water and cover these young plants!"

A few words and echoes.

• awakening and encouragement. The two words of the heading, and both come back in the body — "awaken our hearts" near the start, "awakened" of the new converts at the end.
• without looking about us. Not quite "without looking back," though Lot's wife is somewhere behind it; the German is the wider looking around, distraction as much as retrospect.
• put our whole selves into it. One word in German, and it returns two sentences later as "the wholeness of a little human love" — the same root, and the point of the second is that we will not even give the whole of our small love.
• this Good. God named as the Good itself — the old scholastic and mystical usage, a noun rather than an attribute.
• bows me down. Both the physical stoop and the technical humbling before God; it is not simply "grieves".
• the voice of our Friend. From the Song of Songs, where the Beloved's voice calls at the door while the bride is asleep — which is why deafness and drowsiness stand side by side here.
• the slippery places. A psalm phrase, and he puts himself among those who have slipped on them.
• advanced Christians. Said with an edge: those who reckon themselves far on.
• keep the charge of the Lord. The exact wilderness phrase for waiting on the cloud; in German it sounds like "waiting," which the English cannot keep and the type could.
• prayer of the heart. His technical term for interior prayer, not a warm adjective.
• the type. Israel's wilderness march read as a figure of the Christian life — the old typological sense, not "example".
• spiritual ministration. A New Testament word for the practical help one member of a body renders another; it answers the handshake in the same sentence.
• go as pilgrims. The pilgrim verb, and the same journey as the wilderness of the first paragraph.
• I look for the like from you. An expectation, courteously phrased — not a demand.
• let this, then, be written to him also. The letter is to serve for more readers than its addressees; this is how such letters travelled.
• sanctify it upon her soul. Not that the suffering be taken away, but that it be made holy in its working on her.
• wholesome medicine. The German word carries both "curative" and, faintly, "unto salvation".
• the water of tears into the wine of joy. Cana, unnamed.
• a couple. Two, or two or three; the vagueness is the German's.
• touched and awakened. The standard pair for the first inward stirring and the full change.
• though it be winter. Both the date and the season of the work.
• water and cover. One verb from the planting of a church, the other from the cloud over the tabernacle.