Of the blessedness and freedom of the service of God. A heartfelt wish and covenant for the new year. Encouragement to dying with Christ.

What this letter is. A New Year's letter to a young man who had asked for one. He and his family had been anxious about Tersteegen through the illness that nearly killed him that winter, and had sent to ask after him; this is the answer, written on the same first of February as the letter before it — one desk, one evening, "with a running pen, in the dark of evening." It does three things: it shows the family his handwriting as proof that he is alive; it delivers the wish that was asked for and immediately turns it into something stricter — a compact; and it answers the young man's own extraordinary standing question.

The wish that becomes a covenant. The brother had written on the 9th of December asking for a New Year's wish. Tersteegen replies that the wish was made long ago and sent by a faster courier — "His ever-present Spirit of life will, I trust, have delivered my heartfelt wish" — and then declines to leave it as a pleasantry: "Let what I said just now be our New Year's compact and covenant: Now will we begin to be wholly for God." The old print sets that sentence in the display type it reserves for what must not be skimmed. Everything after it is the covenant's terms: reason, flesh, and blood lose their seat in the council; the two of them are to become "detached, inward children of the heart." And then the term that costs nothing and everything: the doing is not theirs. "Faithful is He that has called us, who also will do it; and we will let Him do it in us."

The question. The young man had once asked — and evidently kept asking — whether Tersteegen would again give him over to death this year, as he had the year before. The print sets the question itself apart, in the quoting type, so the reader sees the young man's own words arrive: whether in this new year, as in the old year now past, I would have you given over unto death? The answer is the letter's center: "Assuredly, dear brother! Just because I love you, I desire that you may die with me." This is not morbid; it is precise. The dying is the daily one — the death to self that is "a beginning of the life eternal" — and the letter's argument is that to wish a friend anything less is to wish him too little.

Against cordials. Then the homely image that makes it unmistakable this winter letter was written by a sick man who had watched other sick men die: "I do not hold with giving the dying so many cordials, whereby their distress and their dying are only prolonged." The cordial — the heart-strengthening restorative of the eighteenth-century sickroom — becomes everything with which we delay the necessary death of the self. And then the plunge: "In with you boldly! it will not prove so deep." The old editors could not trace the phrase; it sounds like the cry to a hesitating swimmer, and he uses it of dying.

The weaned mind. What remains, once one is in, is his quietest counsel: "hold out with Him in a weaned mind" — the soul weaned like the child of the psalm, off every sweetness it used to be fed by — "and simply leave ourselves to his secret drawing."

The name at the end. The letter closes with a request that turns the subscription into its last teaching: "call me by that name with which I subscribe myself." The name is your obliged weak fellow-brother — obliged, in the old sense of bound: the word answers the "covenant" (Verbindung) of the argument-line, and the young man is being asked, every time he writes, to address Tersteegen as what the New Year's compact has made them.

A few words and echoes.

• my poor life. His standing word for himself; lowly, of no account — not miserable.
• loving solicitude. Having someone's welfare at heart; the family's inquiry, named as an act of love.
• powers of life … powers of love. "Our few powers of life and all our powers of love" — few of the one after the illness, all of the other regardless; the sentence offers both.
• created-in. The relation to God is not acquired but built in at the making — "our blessed and adorable Origin" stands in the same sentence.
• enlargement. Inner spaciousness: the paradox that total surrender gives room.
• contentment. The old sense — satisfaction, wanting nothing further — not amusement.
• count no more in the council. Reason, flesh, and blood lose their vote; the apostle "conferred not with flesh and blood."
• Faithful is He that has called us. The promise-verse on which the whole covenant rests; the doing is God's.
• cordials. The sickroom's heart-restoratives, and everything they stand for.
• In with you boldly! A plunge-cry, used of dying; the editors could not trace it, and it may be his own.
• a weaned mind. The psalm's weaned child, off the breast and quiet with its mother.
• his secret drawing. The hidden attraction by which God pulls a soul; "no man can come to me, except the Father draw him."
• with a running pen. His apology for brevity, and the letter's date-stamp: the same evening as the letter before it.
• obliged weak fellow-brother. The name he asks to be called by — obliged in the old sense of bound, the covenant made audible in the signature.