What spiritual advantages have accrued to us through the incorporation of Jesus Christ into our humanity. Adoration of this divine love.

What this letter is. A letter of 18 January 1748 to a young man of about twenty-one who was dying, and who did die that same year. Tersteegen was ill himself when he wrote it — the first words say so. Three of the letters in this collection stand around this one sickbed: one to the man's sister about his illness, one to him on the day that one was written, and this. There will be one more, two weeks later, and then no more.

What he does not do. He does not ask the man to get better, and he does not tell him he is dying. He spends the whole first half of the letter on a single doctrine — that God has already come down into exactly the condition the man is in — and only then turns to the body in the bed. The order matters. By the time the wretched body is allowed into the letter, it has already been surrounded.

Sunk himself into. The verb is a physical one: a seed into soil, a pile into ground, a coffin into a grave. It is not "came into" or "entered". God lowered himself, deliberately and with weight, into our mortal and lost humanity — and mortal here has its old sense, subject to death, which is why the word is chosen. The whole consolation of the letter is contained in that one verb: whatever the man is sinking into, it has been sunk into already.

The chain of verbs. He crucifies, he purifies, and then draws us ever more into himself. Three actions in a rising order, and all three have the same subject — not us. Then the sentence that follows takes even the suffering out of our hands: He himself does and suffers in us. The pairing of doing and suffering is deliberate and old — active and passive, what one performs and what one undergoes — and the point is that Christ is on both sides of it. What is left to the dying man is set out in the smallest possible terms: we have only to abide as children in him.

According to our measure. A phrase from the epistles. The measure is apportioned to us, not achieved by us — which is the difference between a standard and a gift.

The hymn. Two lines from a deathbed hymn of the sixteenth century, quoted from memory and run into the prose. In the first edition it is marked off in a different typeface; in the copy from which the printer worked it is set out as verse, indented. Either way it is meant to be heard as a quotation, and as one that the man would have known. I bide unparted — the old form of "remain undivided from".

Then let the wretched body. Here at last is the sickbed, and the three verbs given to it are unsparing: sicken, be consumed, fall away. He does not soften any of them. What he does instead is put a colon after them and set against them the sentence about the resurrection — and then, most carefully, the promise about the body itself: will not leave behind the least part of our body. Not the soul only. The body that is falling away is the one that will be set forth again.

Wretched. The old word carries exile in it — being out of one's own country — which is nearer to what he means than mere misery.

The inexhaustible sea. Not unfathomable, not bottomless: inexhaustible. The point is not depth but supply. A man may lose himself and all his sins into it without using any of it up.

Suffer willingly. Two words, abrupt after the long sentences, and the adverb is the difficult one. It does not mean gladly. It means without resisting — consent rather than cheerfulness, which is the only thing that could honestly be asked of him.

Yet a little while. A phrase from the gospels and from Hebrews, and everyone reading it would have known where it came from.

A few words and echoes.

• incorporation. Being made a limb of a body — the same image the hymn then supplies.
• accrued. Fallen to us as an increase; a merchant's word, used of grace.
• most precious. The intensifier is one word in the German and cannot be split into two.
• succour. Chosen because the same root returns at the end — he will succour you — and the letter's arch depends on hearing them as one word.
• faith's desire. Appetite, not longing: faith is the organ that reaches.
• communion. Fellowship, having in common.
• no longer our own. The apostle's phrase, and the hinge of the paragraph.
• purifies. The refiner's word, not the washer's — it follows the crucifying.
• seeing that. The conjunction is causal here, not temporal.
• earthly tabernacle. The tent that is struck when the journey ends.
• set forth again. Presented, restored, shown — all three at once.
• without blemish. The sacrificial word, and it is said of a body that is visibly failing.
• adore. Standing in a chain of three, without an object until the end of the phrase.
• sweetest. His own superlative, and the adjective before it is left in the plain degree.
• obliged. The ordinary closing word of the century — and it also means bound to you.
• fellow-brother. Pleonastic in English as in German, and deliberately so.