Counsel and instruction to a sister upon the increasing sickness of her brother.

What this letter is. A short letter of 16 November 1747 to a woman he had been writing to for years — she is the recipient of four other letters in this collection — whose brother was dying. He was ill himself and had been unable to write for a fortnight. The letter does two things: it releases her from the duty of writing back, and it tells her how to look at her brother's illness.

You may be free. It opens with what sounds like a complaint and turns into its opposite. He has been waiting to hear from her; he knows she writes to him "in the spirit," which is welcome but "is not always enough"; and then the reproach he actually means: "You must not always wait until the storm is over and you can write nothing but fine things." Then, immediately, the release — if writing would not be free, or would draw her off from something better, "then do not do it; I only want to show you that you may be free." The whole opening exists to take an obligation away.

My daughter. In the middle of the second paragraph he changes the form of address: not "sister" but "my daughter," as he does in the other letter to her printed here. And what he offers her is not advice but an action of his own: "I can so heartily offer you up to the dearest Saviour." The verb is a sacrificial one. It is also, though he does not say so, exactly what he is about to ask her to do with her brother.

What may be endured and what may not be loved. Then a distinction that is easy to read past and is the letter's practical core. Disturbance, faint-heartedness, gloomy fear — "such things as I have now named we may well endure, when it must be so, but not love or cherish; they must not press into the inward part." The feelings are permitted; what is forbidden is giving them lodging. And the reason follows at once: the inward part is where something else is being handed out — "love, peace, trust, and every virtue, as fruits of the Spirit of Jesus."

Not naturally. The instruction proper is one sentence: "Look at no things in that natural way, but in God and in faith; then everything appears to us otherwise — even your brother's sickness and decline." Natural is a technical word for him, not a synonym for normal: it means seeing a thing as it stands by itself, without God in the picture. And he immediately concedes the obvious objection, carefully: "That nature is aware of some feeling under such circumstances is not sinful, so long as it keeps within bounds; one must confess one's weakness, and yet withal be on one's guard." He is not asking her not to grieve.

If you could see. Then the counterfactual that carries the argument: "Did you see God's lovely and salutary purposes in this too, and with your brother — oh, how you would adore, love, and praise with me." She cannot see it; therefore, "you must believe it, and do that very thing in faith" — that is, do in faith exactly what sight would have made easy.

Ten brothers. The consolation itself is a verse, and he has altered it. He sends her to the first chapter of 1 Samuel, where Elkanah says to his childless wife, "am not I better to thee than ten sons?" Tersteegen writes brothers, because that is what she is losing. And what he draws from the chapter is not really verse 8 at all but what Hannah does later in it: give the child back, and find you have not lost him. "It is not too much that you give your brother to the Saviour; you do not lose him thereby."

He was ill too. The last paragraph is four lines and mostly apology: no time, and a fortnight in which he was "unfit even for the smallest little letter" — the same diminutive he had used of her letters at the start, now turned on himself. The brother did not recover; he died the following year.

A few words and echoes.

• counsel and instruction. The heading's pair, and the letter delivers both in that order.
• how all goes with you. Everything, not merely how she is.
• a little letter in the spirit. Her unwritten letters; the diminutive comes back at the close, of his own.
• outright. The old sense of just — precisely, downright; not "merely".
• inward freedom. Freedom of the inward ground from constraint, duty included. His technical term.
• offer you up. Sacrificial, and deliberately so.
• my daughter. Startling in a letter addressed to a sister, and left startling.
• kept and held. Two verbs, and both passive: she is not to keep herself.
• faint-heartedness. Smallness of spirit, not feebleness of mind.
• gloomy fear. A colouring of the mind rather than a fear of something.
• endure … but not love or cherish. The distinction the paragraph turns on.
• the inward part. The ground where God alone works — a place, not a mood.
• fruits of the Spirit. Plural in the German where the epistle has the singular; and only the first two of his four are in the verse.
• full and blossoming. In bloom, not merely thriving.
• in that natural way. Seeing a thing by itself, with God left out.
• decline. The old word for a wasting illness.
• within bounds. Grief is allowed its own enclosure.
• lovely and salutary. Worthy of love, and health-giving — both the sickbed and salvation are in the second word.
• adore. Standing alone, without an object, as in the German.
• give your brother. Not "give up": the next clause exists to deny the loss.
• takes you in hand. Takes your case up, deals with you — active, not merely caring.
• unfit. Not up to it; the word the epistles use for sufficiency.
• for once. At last, at least this once — not "one day".
• Be of good courage. Confidence, not consolation, and the difference is the letter's argument.
• bound to you in God. The ordinary letter-closing word, and it also means joined.