Encouragement to a more cheerful, childlike walk before God.

What this letter is. A letter of 3 February 1747 to a woman he had been writing to for years and calls "my dear daughter." She had gone quiet; she is unwell; and at some earlier point she had asked him for rules — a plan of conduct to follow. The letter does three things in turn, and does them briskly: it complains that she does not write, it tells her to stop being miserable, and it answers her request for rules in two words.

Say it plainly. The complaint is affectionate and slightly exasperated. "Do you think that I forget you, and should not ask how it goes with you?" Then the reproach proper: if he is her brother, why is she not "a simple child" with him — why not "write in plain German what it is that ails you again"? The German idiom means straight out, without circumlocution, and it is kept as the idiom because the whole passage is about plain speech. Then the two dry sentences that give the letter its tone: "Or am I always merely to guess at it? … you would have the Lord make it known to me. Only, I am no prophet."

Not called out of the world to be wretched. The second movement begins with the sentence the letter exists for: "The Lord has not called you out of the world in order to make you sorrowful and wretched, but in order to make you happy from henceforth in His sweet love and in His beautiful service." From henceforth — not after death. That is the claim the rest of the paragraph defends, against the obvious objection that suffering is real. His answer is not that it is unreal: "If the flesh has sufferings; if the Saviour's yoke gives nature some pain; if trials and assaults come: should we sorrow over it, and not rather rejoice in the spirit? For these very things can be a proof to us that we are still on the right way."

Wash your face. Then the practical rule, and it is a scriptural one: he sends her to Christ's words on fasting. Do not advertise the fast by looking miserable — "anoint your head and wash your face." Tersteegen applies it to inward hardship rather than to literal fasting: "If it goes somewhat straitly with us inwardly, one must not on that account straightway look sour," so that "world, nature, and the enemy may not perceive it exactly, but only the Father in heaven." The cheerfulness he is asking for is not a mood. It is a discipline of concealment, and the audience it is concealed from is named.

No great ado. The same paragraph disposes of the other half of her melancholy, which is remorse. "If here or there we have not done rightly, let us make no such great ado over that either! just as if we had to atone for it again by a long disquiet and sorrowing." What replaces the long remorse is a sequence of four quick actions: confess the fault, turn from it "with a quiet displeasure," embrace the child Jesus, and forget the whole thing. The polemic is exact — protracted self-reproach is treated as an attempt to make one's own atonement.

Do but love. Then her request for rules, and the answer. "You desire admonitions concerning your conduct; I do not know how you mean this. Ah! do but love; then you have rules enough." And the expansion, which is the densest sentence in the letter: "Let your prayer be loving — that is, in detachment from all created things to embrace God in the ground, and to leave yourself to the God who is inwardly and at all times near you." Every important word there is a technical one. Then the practical form it takes, in five bare verbs: "Do, speak, keep silence, suffer, deny all things only with the simple intention of pleasing God out of love."

Spare your head. The close turns to her health and then to his own, and the two are put side by side without ceremony. She is not to strain: "Guard yourself against all straining of the head, especially as the head is heavy at present. Rather say a few words of love to the Lord" — a few, because more would be an effort. Then, after a break in the printed text where the eighteenth-century editor cut something away, the last paragraph: "I do not forget you, dear sister; only be childlike, and pray also for me, who am at present sorely ailing in the head, and daily feverish." He is asking a sick woman to pray for a sick man. The letter that began by scolding her for silence ends by needing her.

A quotation nobody has traced. One line stands unexplained: "The world may live in sorrow, etc." The "etc." shows he expected her to finish it from memory, and the old print sets it in the display type it reserves for quoted matter, so it is almost certainly a hymn stanza. It has not been identified, and no attribution is offered here.

A few words and echoes.

• cheerful. The heading's word is literally "brightened, cleared up," as of weather — and the letter's whole argument is against a sour face.
• childlike. Never childish. The word runs through the letter — a simple child, the child Jesus, "only be childlike" at the close — and it is the same root as the "childlike walk" of the heading.
• simple. Not slow-witted: singleness, absence of contrivance. The same word returns in "say out simply" and in "the simple intention."
• in plain German. The German idiom for speaking straight out; kept as the idiom rather than domesticated.
• misery. Spiritual wretchedness, the soul's poverty, not misfortune.
• I am no prophet. Amos's disclaimer, and used for the same purpose: I have no special channel, so use ordinary speech.
• oppressed. Pressed hard, hemmed in.
• from henceforth. Happiness beginning now. The old print raises the word Now to a capital in mid-sentence.
• strippings. A technical term of this tradition: God's withdrawal of felt consolation, the soul laid bare.
• trials and assaults. Provings that put one to the proof, and sudden onsets.
• straitly. Tight, short-rationed — the metaphor of narrow means, apt beside fasting.
• look sour. Luther's own wording in the fasting passage, kept literal because the whole sentence depends on the face.
• perceive it exactly. The eighteenth-century just means precisely, not merely.
• nature. Unregenerate human nature, a technical term — and note the enemy is a third party alongside it.
• ado. "Why make ye this ado" — the old English for a great fuss.
• atone. The German says "reconcile," and the point is that protracted remorse is an attempt at self-atonement.
• quiet displeasure. One act, not a standing mood; and it is set deliberately against the "disquiet" two lines above.
• admonitions concerning your conduct. In this period the word means remonstrances or rules, not memories.
• do but love. Two words in the German, and the answer to her whole request.
• detachment. The old mystical term for release from created things.
• in the ground. The ground of the soul — and the same word he used a page earlier of the fellowship whose ground is God Himself.
• leave yourself to God. The verb of self-abandonment; "leave" keeps the passivity that "surrender" would over-energize.
• keep silence. One of five bare verbs, and the only one that is not an action.
• the head is heavy. The German has no possessive: it may be hers or a general observation, and his own head is aching four lines later.
• a few words of love. Few, because she is not to strain.
• testify. An act of witness, not merely of reassurance.
• obliged brother. The standard epistolary "beholden" — but the word also means bound and joined, which is what the letter's opening paragraph said about their fellowship.