Comforting encouragement and a wish of blessing to a sick man.

What this letter is — and where it stands. The last surviving letter to a young man of about twenty-one who was dying, written two weeks after the one before it. He died later that year. It is short, and it is not really a letter of advice at all: it is a blessing, and then a prayer, and the prayer is where it ends.

A note on the date. The printed collection dates this letter the 1st of January 1748. It was in fact written on the 1st of February — the manuscript copy from which the printers worked says so plainly, and the error was made in setting the type. The English above keeps the printed date, as the edition's practice requires, but the letter belongs a month later than it appears to.

Once more. The first two words look back at the letter of a fortnight before, and I find myself moved is not a formula: he is reporting an impulse he has noticed in himself. It is worth knowing that he was ill when he wrote both of them.

He who has undertaken for you. An old English phrase, and the right one: to undertake for someone is to take their case up, to assume charge of it. Hezekiah uses it in Isaiah, praying on what he thinks is his deathbed — O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me. The German is the ordinary idiom, but the English available to a Bible-formed ear is that verse, and the situation is the same one.

Will himself perfect his work in you. The emphasis falls on the person, not the work: he himself, and no one else, will finish it. This is the consolation of the whole first paragraph. The man in the bed is not being asked to complete anything.

Entrust to him. Three things are handed over in one clause — the wretched body, the soul, the eternal salvation — and the verb is one of committing something into safe keeping, not one of feeling. Wretched, in the old sense that has exile in it rather than mere misery: a body out of its own country.

The great High Priest. Here the letter changes shape. What follows is a blessing in the form the Hebrew Scriptures give it — the priest lifting his hands over the person and speaking. The hands are lifted over him, held above, exactly as at the end of Luke's gospel where the last thing Christ does before leaving is lift up his hands and bless. The point of putting the priest at the right hand of the Father is that he is doing it still.

Reconciled, cleansed, and acceptable unto God. Three words in a rising order, and the last is the word used of a sacrifice. It stands one sentence after the High Priest, which is not an accident.

Yea, Amen. The pivot. From here to the end he is no longer writing to the sick man but praying to Christ, and the sick man has become the third person — the dear sick brother — because he is being handed over rather than addressed. It is the most careful thing in the letter and it should not be smoothed: the change of pronoun is the act.

Abide with me. The word the two on the road to Emmaus use at evening, and everyone reading would have heard it.

This shadow-life. His own coined compound: not a dim or uncertain life, but the shadow of which something else is the substance. A shadow does not fade — it vanishes, when the light moves.

Vouchsafe us. The verb means to grant without grudging, to concede freely what might have been withheld. Its opposite in German is to begrudge, and that is what the word is defending against.

That we may soon greet one another again. The letter opened with a greeting sent from a distance and closes by asking for the same greeting exchanged face to face. Between those two greetings is everything the letter is for.

A few words and echoes.

• encouragement. Words spoken to someone; the German is what one says to a person, not a feeling one produces in them.
• a wish of blessing. Two words in the German, joined; the compound is left visible.
• in the power of the name. Not "by" — the greeting is performed inside that power, not merely enabled by it.
• out of his open heart. A source drawn from, and the old image of the pierced side stands behind it.
• support. An under-propping: what holds up a body that can no longer hold itself.
• of his grace. Out of grace, as the ground of the giving.
• at the right hand. The place, and the tense — he is there now.
• lift up his hands. A blessing-formula, and the English subjunctive carries it without any added "may".
• acceptable unto God. The sacrificial word.
• become and remain. Both verbs are kept; the second is the one that matters at a deathbed.
• presented. Set before, as at a court and as at an altar.
• vanishes. What a shadow does, and what a vapour does.
• abide. Kept for this one place, so that the earlier "remain" does not steal it.
• perfectly and without end. The first word answers perfect his work in the opening paragraph.
• obliged. The century's ordinary closing word — and it also means bound to you.