Direction to the heart of Jesus, and encouragement to the going-out from oneself and from all created things.

The Hundred and Twenty-third Letter.

Direction to the heart of Jesus, and encouragement to the going-out from oneself and from all created things.

N. N.

Heartily joyful and thankful is it to me to learn that the hardest with the known trial seems to be past. God be praised! May He strengthen and arm the heart unto that which may yet be behind; that we may ever be found more courageous and unconditional!

The heart of Jesus is our fortress; He allures, He helps us in; but after His manner and way: Let us yield ourselves will-lessly and simply to His drawings and to His discipline! In the world is all straitened; in ourselves also it avails not. Out! out! In Jesus alone is our only, quiet, eternal life. O! a thousand crucifixions and deaths are a thousandfold replaced by the blessed experience of a quarter of an hour, when the Spirit is made partaker of this life in Jesus.

Thus it is: All corruption, the ground of all our sufferings and disturbances, is in us, although God's goodness uses all manner of instruments, encounters and means to reveal this our misery, and to prepare us, and as it were to make us ripe for recovery. O! that should justly so rightfully be acknowledged of us; it is love and not wrath, good and not evil. Second God in His holy intentions over you, dear sister! He will make you miserable, weak, small, and into a child without will: Yet become not faint-hearted thereby; consent from the heart unto your universal nothing. Marvel not thereat, that you find yourselves so as you do! There is nothing at all good nor beautiful in us. But chiefly it is to bring you thereto, that especially in the time of prayer and of the inward-turning you leave yourselves very much alone, as a thing of which you are already persuaded that nothing is to be expected of it; that you accordingly leave your own (thinking, willing, working) very much idle, in expectation of the divine, to leave room for the same. For this is the kernel and the aim of the whole Christian inward life and prayer, that what is ours stand still, yield, die, but Jesus live in us: that we go out from all, and also from ourselves, to enter into Jesus. To that end is He become so inwardly near unto us, and meets us with His gentle drawings in the still ground, to help us, after He has made us right narrow and satiated in ourselves and in the creature.

When the child is so right weak and sick, and has been terrified by dogs, then holds the dear mother the lap wide open, and calls: Now come! Now come! Do you not hear it? dear sister! Ah yes! we come. Amen!

May the sweet love-power out of Jesus' heart penetrate ours, that we may become right sweet children, to the joy and honor of our Father in heaven! He shows much much love; but He is wholly and essentially love. O! that His love, which He shows us, might only urge and draw us to the love which He Himself is! His inward knowledge gives peace, holiness and all blessedness from Now on: Therefore is the exercise of prayer, and the inward sabbath, so needful. — —

German

Der hundertunddreiundzwanzigste Brief.

Hinweisung zum Herzen JEsu, und Aufmunterung zum Ausgang aus sich selbst und allem Geschaffenen.

N. N. Herzlich erfreulich und erkänntlich ist mirs, zu vernehmen, daß das Härteste mit der bewußten Probe scheinet vorbey zu seyn.

— 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).