That the fairest rules of self-forgetting help little, when God wills that we should see and feel ourselves.

What this letter is. A short letter mending a visit that went wrong. The brother had been at Mülheim and left burdened — the old word is heaviness — and did not come back through on his way home; now he has written, evidently anxious that the heaviness might have been Tersteegen's fault, and asking about some unresolved matter with a third person. The reply does three things in a page and a half: it settles the practical matter by handing it to God, it clears the air between the two men, and then — because the brother's real trouble is that his devotion has stopped working — it delivers one of the collection's plainest statements of a hard doctrine: there are seasons when God wills that we feel our own wretchedness, and in those seasons no technique of self-forgetting will rescue us.

The bottom line of the ledger. The practical matter is dispatched with a merchant's figure: whatever comes of the negotiation, "you may beforehand make up the close of the reckoning" — strike the closing balance in advance — "with the Saviour's words: My kingdom is not of this world." An account normally closes with a sum; this one closes with a renunciation. Written to men who kept ledgers for a living, it is pre-emptive consolation dressed as arithmetic: enter the loss now, and find it is no loss.

The cleared air. Then the delicate paragraph, done with scrupulous honesty. He hopes the heaviness "has not lain on my side" — and will not claim more than a man can know: "with knowledge and will no such thing has been done. My heart is single toward you, so far as I know myself." That last clause is the signature of the whole spirituality: even his own sincerity he holds with an open hand.

When the rules stop working. The heart of the letter reverses the expected counsel. It is true, he concedes, that one must not gaze at oneself, nor ground one's confidence in one's own frames; true too that, when God gives liberty, one should lift "heart and the mind's eye gently and confidingly above oneself unto the Lord." All his own teaching — conceded, and then set aside: "But when God wills that we should see and feel ourselves, then the fairest rules of self-forgetting help little; and when he clips our wings, then no striving to fly up avails." The bird-image carries the theology: the wings are not broken but clipped, by the same hand the soul would fly to. What remains is neither technique nor despair: "One must yield and bow as best one can, till God's hour comes." And the paragraph's last sentence gives the season its meaning: "Out of littleness of heart there grows at last the pure confidence in God" — the humbled smallness is the seed-bed of the very trust the soul thinks it has lost.

Two prayers of one line. The letter ends with the shortest exchange of intercession in the collection: "Remember me; I do, with God, the like."

A few words and echoes.

• heaviness. The old word for the burdened spirit — "ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations" — and the letter's recurring diagnosis.
• the divine direction. God's steering of an affair; the matter with N. is not dropped but re-addressed.
• the close of the reckoning. The ledger's final line, entered before the negotiation begins.
• single toward you. Without folds — the single eye of the Sermon on the Mount, applied to friendship.
• so far as I know myself. The honest limit of every self-report; he will not vouch even for his own depths.
• one's own frames. The old devotional word for inward states and conditions — exactly what must not bear the weight of confidence.
• the mind's eye. Raised "gently and confidingly" — the letter's one description of what prayer should be in better seasons.
• faint-heartedness. The natural discouragement one must not indulge — carefully distinct from the graced "littleness of heart" at the paragraph's end.
• clips our wings. They shall mount up with wings as eagles — until the Owner of the wings himself trims them; then waiting is the only flight.
• yield and bow. A rhyming pair in the German, homely counsel: fit yourself to the season, and stoop.
• till God's hour comes. The hour is his; ours is the meantime.
• littleness of heart. Not a fault but a harvest — out of it "grows at last the pure confidence in God."
• as it comes. His deprecation of his own counsel: written with a running pen, to one who already knows.
• Remember me. The prayer-formula of the whole brotherhood, answered in kind before the ink is dry.