A powerful encouragement to faith in the Lord Jesus, upon occasion of a raging epidemic.

What this letter is. Written from Mülheim on 26 September 1747 to a friend at Crefeld, where an epidemic was then raging. Two of his letters had arrived while Tersteegen was away; he had already heard the news on the road, at Solingen — that the sickness had reached Crefeld, and that a woman of the circle had died. The letter answers both pieces of news at once, and it is, among other things, a letter written by a sick man: he says at the end that weakness prevents him writing to the bereaved husband himself.

Names removed. The printed text a reader has in front of them has been cut. Every proper name in it has been reduced to a single letter — S. for Solingen, C. for Crefeld, J. and N. for the family whose loss is reported — and a long passage has been struck out altogether, leaving only a printer's rule on the page. What was removed was mostly domestic: questions about who was still well, whether some travellers had got home safely, greetings to eight or nine people by name. The eighteenth-century editor who prepared the letter for print wanted the doctrine and not the household.

The end of God's ways. The first paragraph does the theological work, and it turns on a phrase from the epistle of James — "ye have seen the end of the Lord" — where end means outcome, what a thing comes to at last. "Could we see the end of God's ways, we should adore the ways themselves also from the heart, yea, with thankful wonder." Since we cannot see it, the sentence continues, we are to believe it. The whole letter is contained in that move: not an explanation of the epidemic, but a refusal to require one.

Not a hair. Before that comes the promise it rests on — that of God's children "not the least hair shall be harmed apart from His fatherly will of love." Said in a plague year, to a man whose neighbours are dying, it is a harder sentence than it looks, and Tersteegen does not soften it.

The prayer. Then, in the middle of the second paragraph, the letter breaks into direct address. It is the one place in either of these two letters where Tersteegen stops speaking about God and speaks to Him: "Ah, Thou Lover of men, what else indeed dost Thou seek? And how soon Thou repentest Thee of the punishment, if only the hearts truly yield themselves to Thee!" He gives the reference — Joel 2 — but the words are not a quotation; he has turned the prophet's third person into second, which is what turns a text into a prayer.

The market. The next sentence is the one that gives the letter away as written to a merchant, and it is a price quotation: "the wares of the world often fall mightily in the time of distress; but when the distress is past, they soon rise again." The world's goods lose their value in a plague, and recover it afterwards — and so, he implies, does the piety that the plague produced. That is why he has just prayed for a conversion that would abide.

The centurion. For himself and the Crefeld friends he asks one specific gift: "the faith of the centurion at Capernaum." The reason follows in a sentence of great compression: "Jesus is the Lord, the sickness is a servant, and goes at His bidding." The centurion's argument was that he too was a man under authority, who said to one Go, and he went. Tersteegen applies it to the epidemic.

What not to do. Then the practical counsel, and it is about the imagination: "The natural, human looking at a thing, the considering, the talking, and the fearful expectation of it — especially of a cross, a sickness, or death — do but set the mind in a hurtful confusion, distraction, and faint-heartedness." The remedy is not to think about something else but to look at someone else: "Let us look not at things in themselves, but at our good, sweet Saviour in all things and ways." And then the promise that grace comes on time and not before: God "will give us what is needful in the hour we need it, without our being anxious before the time."

Midnight. The last movement is the parable of the ten virgins, and it is worth noticing how completely it takes over. It is midnight; a sleep like an illness has fallen on wise and foolish alike; God's judgments call from outside and His grace from inside, to keep people awake; and then the cry itself, which the old print sets off as a quotation: The bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet Him! Tersteegen then does with it what he does with every text — he turns it into a direction: go out from yourselves, and go out to meet Him. In the manuscript he underlined both halves of that application, to tie them back to the verse. The printed text does not show it.

The widower. The letter ends with the bereavement it began with. He greets the husband; he calls the death "a stroke of the divine mercy" and says why — mercy to the woman, spared a long illness, and mercy to the man, because "God has yet something in purpose with him." Then the plainest sentence in the letter: "but prayer is needful for him and for us." He asks the friend to pass the message on, because he is too unwell to write again.

A few words and echoes.

• heart's brother. One word in German, and it opens a run of heart that goes on all through the letter.
• the visiting hand of God. Visiting in the old sense — coming, whether in judgment or in mercy; the noun visitation returns two paragraphs later.
• departure. He avoids the word death both times he mentions this one, and so does the English.
• end. Outcome, what a thing comes to at last — the epistle's word, not the modern "ending".
• adore. Of God's ways, which is why not "worship".
• voice of repentance. One of three voices in the letter: this one, the voice of judgments from without, and the voice of grace from within.
• abiding. The letter's key word, and the print emphasises three of its four occurrences: an abiding conversion, no abiding city, abiding in the spirit.
• Lover of men. The old epithet for God as the lover of humankind.
• wares … fall … rise. A market report, and meant as one.
• surrender. His standing term for handing oneself over; the same word as in the previous letter.
• fellow-called. A coinage in German too — those called along with him.
• distraction. Literally a scattering, and it is answered four lines later by gathering ourselves in.
• faint-heartedness. Smallness of spirit, not feeble-mindedness.
• frame of mind. The same word as the mind thrown into confusion just above.
• what is needful. Not "necessities": the supply in view is grace.
• no abiding city. From Hebrews, quoted without signal.
• lethargy. An illness-word in German too — the drowsiness of the parable described as a sickness, in a letter about a sickness.
• shadow-being. A coinage: the world as both insubstantial and dishonest.
• heart-prayer. His technical term for interior prayer.
• awakening. Rousing from sleep — and, just under the surface, from death.
• methinks. An old form for an old form; the German is equally archaic.
• obliged. The ordinary letter-closing word of the period, but it also means bound and joined.