Strengthening of the purpose to will to be wholly for God. How the gentle looking upon the Crucified is the best means against all temptations.

What this letter is. A letter of spiritual direction to the young man who had copied out, for the family's keeping, the letters Tersteegen wrote to his dying brother — and who, three months after that brother's death, had written to ask whether his own way of praying was sound. He had been practising a "gentle looking upon the Crucified," and something in him had begun to doubt it. The answer opens with a smile — write to me plainly, no one reads my letters but me — and then does three things: it renews the ground-resolve, it defends the gentle look with a French poet, and it dismisses the scruple.

The ground-resolve. Before the question is even addressed, the foundation is re-laid: "that unfeigned purpose… henceforth to be and to live for him alone and for eternity." At prayer, this is renewed by "a deliberate, simple, naked laying-open of yourself" before a Friend "as neither flatters nor upbraids" — the two things no human confidant quite avoids. In business hours, a "peaceable look" suffices. But without the resolve underneath, "all is without power, without fruit, and only a superficial, forced thing."

Fighting without fighting. The counsel on temptation is the tradition's paradox stated as tactics: "you must not fight them directly and with straining, but indirectly." Straining of head and breast — the felt effort the young man probably took for earnestness — is dismissed in one homely image: "well-meaning strokes in the air," the apostle's beating of the air made kindly. "Despise, forget your enemy as well as you can; then is he overcome… let all go as it goes; then the enemy can do nothing to you, and Another will fight in you and for you." And against the standing slander of this whole spirituality, one sharp sentence: to let God work "is anything but a false idleness."

The French poet. Then the letter does something rare in the collection: it cites a book by name and page — Malaval, the blind Marseilles mystic, on the gentle gaze at the Crucified — quotes four lines of his French, and offers a rhymed German translation, Tersteegen's own. The old print gives the quatrain with quotation-dashes, and picks out in its emphasis type the two phrases the whole letter turns on: the strong deed and the gentle look. "He calls it indeed a powerful deed, and yet also a gentle look" — because the power is not in the strain of the one looking, but in the One looked at.

The scruple dismissed. The young man's worry was a refined one — whether even this gentle beholding might be "an act somewhat too active or too image-bound" for pure prayer. The reply refuses to out-theologize the worry; it applies the Lord's own rule: "Prove the tree by its fruits. You perceive singular profit thereby; that is surely enough." And then, with the liberty that marks the whole letter: if a painting of the Crucified kept me from sin, I would use it gladly — "yet bind myself to nothing but to God alone."

A few words and echoes.

• strengthening of the purpose. The argument's word — the settled bent of the will, not a mood to be worked up.
• write plain German. The old idiom for speaking straight out — write frankly; the reason follows: no eyes but his ever see the letters.
• naked laying-open. The self laid bare in prayer, without ornament, excuse, or even formulated words.
• neither flatters nor upbraids. The two failure-modes of every human confidant, both absent in the divine Friend: no cosseting, no casting-up of faults.
• a peaceable look. The mid-work glance toward God that makes no war and needs no words.
• superficial, forced thing. Devotion without the ground-resolve, shallow and strained at once.
• strokes in the air. Blows that land on nothing — sincere, strenuous, and wasted.
• Another will fight. The war handed over; "the Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace."
• sunk into your nothingness. The creature's own nothing, into which one subsides so that God alone acts.
• a false idleness. The charge always flung at this way of prayer, conceded in the adjective and refuted in the sentence.
• to fall to scrupling. The director's word for the over-tender conscience questioning its own graces.
• too active or too image-bound. The scruple of a soul afraid its beholding is still its own doing, still tied to a picture.
• prove the tree by its fruits. The Lord's rule, applied to a way of praying.
• the gentle gaze. Malaval's doux regard — pressing more strongly than every care, precisely because it does not press.
• Be of good courage… He will also do it. The letter ends where the covenant-letters of this year all end: "Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it."