That God withdraws the sensible good, that we may assume nothing to ourselves, but recognize everything as grace. Encouragement unto the glorious end.

The Eighteenth Letter.

That God withdraws the sensible good, that we may assume nothing to ourselves, but recognize everything as grace. Encouragement unto the glorious end.

Dearly beloved sister in the grace!

Your agreeable little letter of the 19th of September I have received aright, but for want of time and of ability have not been able to answer sooner than today. In the spirit I send you many a little letter and wish of blessing; for although you describe your state to me as so wretched, yet I have now not less union with you than formerly, when you had lovely days.

Be of good courage and do not despair, dear sister! it must go so. If we are to be thoroughly delivered from our deeply-infiltrated corruption, then we must see and feel it with pain: And, that we may ascribe it to free grace alone, and not to our earnestness, ability and prayer, we must feel it a good long while, till under the feeling we sink for faintness into the grace. If you had so seen and felt yourself soon at the beginning, as now, then you would not have begun the way, for faint-heartedness; therefore God gave you at that time His sweet love-milk to drink, and kept for you the courage and the ability, till His love had you fast. But if you had also kept your first good, your sensibility, taste and ability, then God would not have gotten His honor in you, but own presumption and the subtle self-pleasing would have spoiled all the good; from that God will now purify you, which does not proceed without hurting.

For example: You write of the disorderly desire in eating and drinking. In such abstinences own presumption and self-complacency come: Now, to purify us from that, one must painfully experience that one can deliver oneself neither from this nor from any other desire, that one may sink poor and toilsome into the grace, that God Himself may take all desire and love captive. In the easiness and pleasantness of prayer own presumption comes; one can collect oneself and find God without any effort and with all pleasure, that no hour falls too long. Afterwards it goes just otherwise; with all effort one cannot get rid of the imaginations, nor bring the mind to devotion, which devotion nonetheless appears quite forced, dry and fruitless. Only, that one may deeply recognize that all former praying and collecting was truly of God, and not our own work, and that one may now learn to wait just upon the praying of the Spirit of God in us with humble trust; (Rom. 8:26.) So often all hearing, and all reading of divine truths, wherein one had before so great a taste, becomes quite dry, powerless and unintelligible, even also to sweep out the self-pleasing herein. And so it goes in all the remaining pieces, of which you name some. God will not take the good from you, but He will destroy the corruption and the selfhood which was in the good. You shall only thoroughly recognize that you are so full of miseries, of which you can help yourself from none; and, that you have nothing good in you, or can bring any to pass, but that all your help and salvation must come in you from God and His grace alone. See, dear sister! when you hold out in this school with humble waiting and trust, and have learned your lesson so well that you are not easily in danger of forgetting it any more, then the Lord afterward gives you everything again at once and with gain, which you thought to have lost: But He gives it again in such wise, that you will eternally recognize it as a thing given out of grace, and must ascribe the honor to God alone, but to yourself guilt and shame.

O! do not lose courage! Do not give way! God means it well: the end will be glorious. Such a God, such an end are well worth going through a thorny and miry way for. I trust His hidden hand will hold you fast further, as has happened hitherto; into this hand let yourself fall with courage. I see indeed your misery, also your faults, but I see yet no danger in your way. The faith and the love, upon which everything depends, are still in your heart according to the ground; for you believe God so great, so good, and worthy to be loved, that you will so heartily gladly give the world with all its desire away for His sake; that you would rather not wish to live, than not to live wholly for God; that it is your greatest desire to please God, and your greatest suffering, to find something displeasing to God in and on you. Ah sister! flesh and blood has not given you this mind. But if this noble mind also, rather not to live than not to live wholly for God, is to go into fulfillment with you, then you must not turn therewith into yourself, into your own purpose and ability, but you must sink yourself therewith in, and hunger trustingly into the noble ground from which it springs, namely into God, who is to you, even in the dark, inward-near in the sweet name of Jesus. In the same be heartily greeted. I remain by grace unmoved

Your Mülheim, weak brother. the 18th of October, 1756.

German

Der achtzehnte Brief.

Daß GOtt das empfindliche Gute entziehe, damit wir uns selbst nichts anmaßen, sondern alles als Gnade erkennen. Muthgebung auf das herrliche Ende.

Herzlich geliebte Schwester in der Gnade!

Dein angenehmes Brieflein vom 19ten Septembr. habe zurecht erhalten, aber aus Mangel der Zeit und des Vermögens nicht eher als heute beantworten können.

— Opening lines of the original German. The complete transcription of all 605 letters appears in the forthcoming Encounter Press critical edition; Brief 1 is shown in full as a sample.

German text: public domain (1773–75 first edition / 1845 Gesammelte Schriften).