God's purpose of love in the chastisement of His own. Direction how to bear oneself under it.

What this letter is. Written from Mülheim on 13 October 1747 to a friend at Crefeld, seventeen days after the letter printed here as the eighty-sixth and to the same man. An epidemic was still running there. Two of his letters had come; this is the reply, and it is almost entirely one sustained argument — that the God who is hurting them means them well, and what follows from that.

Cut, and not marked as cut. What a reader has in front of them is about a third of what Tersteegen wrote. The printed text drops the address, a note about his own headaches, a whole paragraph of news about who at Crefeld was recovering and who had fallen ill, a rhymed couplet in its original place, greetings to sixteen people by name, and the signature. Unlike the letter before it, the print gives no sign at all that anything has been taken out.

The kings and the King. The argument opens with a dry aside about politics: "The kings of the earth say they wage war only for peace's sake; whether that is true, and how they understand it, I leave to them." That is the setup. Of the King of peace the same claim is simply true, and the rest of the paragraph works it out in a series of balanced clauses: "He does not hurt His creatures from His heart; and when our condition unavoidably requires it, then He hurts only that He may do good. He does not smite, except that He may be able to embrace and to gladden."

A King who needs no subjects. Then the turn that gives the paragraph its depth. God "neither needs nor seeks subjects for His own sake, and yet He seeks them as though He had need of them" — and the reason is not His advantage but theirs: "that He may make His subjects themselves free, glorious, and blessed." The political metaphor is being used against itself; the whole point is that this King's sovereignty is the opposite of the earthly kind. And then the measure: we become free "in the measure that our hearts truly become subject to Him."

No end of peace. The paragraph closes on two verses set against each other — Isaiah, that of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end, which Tersteegen turns inward ("when His government becomes rightly great in us"); and Job, "who has ever resisted Him and been able to find peace?" The one promises peace to the surrendered, the other denies it to the resister. The old print letterspaces the second peace so the reader would catch the answering echo.

Lay down your arms. The third paragraph is where the argument becomes an appeal, and Tersteegen puts it in the mouth of the Spirit: "Lay down your arms, you foolish children! Resist your Benefactor no longer, and submit yourselves in truth to your God, lest it grow too hot for you!" The military language has been prepared for by the kings at the start; what is asked is a formal surrender, "abjuring all strange lords" — the language of forswearing an allegiance. And in the middle of it, a sentence that keeps the whole from becoming a scolding: "See how quickly it repents Him that He must use the rod."

Sitting still. Before the appeal comes the practical instruction, and it is characteristically inward: that we should "sit down quite still before the all-searching eyes of our God, and let Him seek out and root out where we have hitherto, grossly or subtly, resisted His rightful claims upon our hearts." Not self-examination but stillness under examination — and the pairing grossly or subtly concedes that the second is the likelier.

The prayer. It ends with the Lord's Prayer, two petitions of it, and then one of his own that is not in the Lord's Prayer at all: "Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done! and let ours die and be buried!" That last clause is the whole letter in six words. Then a rhymed couplet, which he plainly expected his friend to finish: "The cross is a pledge of love out of the Beloved's hand, &c." Nobody has traced it.

A few words and echoes.

• purpose of love. One of three love- compounds in the letter — purpose of love, God of love, pledge of love — and they are meant to be heard together.
• chastisement. The paternal, corrective word, not punishment.
• bear oneself under it. Both how to conduct oneself and what is being borne.
• constrained. Not merely moved; the word for being pressed by an inward necessity.
• your circumstances there. A plural "your" — he is answering the whole Crefeld company through one man.
• sparing mercy. Mercy that holds the blow back — the point, in a plague year.
• from His heart. Not "willingly": the German keeps the organ, and so does this.
• do good. The German pairs hurt and do well, and then makes God the Well-doer — a three-way echo English cannot hold; "Benefactor" below is the survivor of it.
• subjects. Kept in the political sense throughout, against become subject and submit, because the paragraph is built on kingship.
• government. An odd English word here, and deliberately so: it is the word Isaiah's prophecy uses of the Messiah's throne, and Tersteegen has moved that throne inside the soul.
• going abroad. Of an epidemic and of judgments at once — the period idiom does both.
• all-searching eyes. Eyes that try and prove, not merely look.
• grossly or subtly. A standing pair in this devotional vocabulary; the subtle resistance is the dangerous one.
• lay down your arms. A surrender formula, prepared by the kings at the paragraph's head.
• Benefactor. A title, and one the New Testament uses pointedly of kings.
• too hot for you. A household phrase dropped into a solemn passage; kept as an idiom.
• the rod. The instrument of the chastisement in the heading.
• abjuring. Formally forswearing an allegiance — the legal word, and the sentence runs on the legal fiction.
• strange lords. Not "other masters"; the biblical register, and behind it Isaiah's "other lords have had dominion over us."
• pledge of love. A surety, a token given in security.
• &c. The 18th-century "etc.", showing the verse goes on.