How good it is, when weaned from all beside,
With God alone the soul is satisfied,
Deep hidden in His Heart !
How good it is, redeemed, and washed, and shriven,
To dwell, a cloistered soul, with Christ in Heaven,
Joined, nevermore to part !
How good the heart's still chamber thus to close
On all hut God alone—
There in the sweetness of His love repose,
His love unknown'.
All else for ever lost—forgotten all
That else can be
In rapture undisturbed, O Lord, to fall,
And worship Thee.
No place, no time, 'neath those eternal skies.
How still, how sweet, and how surpassing fair
That solitude in glades of Paradise,
And, as in olden days, God walking there.
I hear His voice amidst the stillness blest,
And care and fear are past ;
I lay me down within His Arms to rest
From all my works at last.
How good it is when from the distant land,
From lonely wanderings and from weary ways,
The soul bath reached at last the golden strand,
The Gates of Praise !
There, where the tide of endless love flows free,
There, in the sweet and glad eternity,
The still, unfading NOW :
Ere yet the days and nights of earth are o'er,
Begun the day that is for evermore—
Such rest art Thou!
—G. TE.RSTEEGEN.
OF the latter years of his life we know most from his letters. It was a life hidden with Christ in God—a life lived in heaven, but yet concerned lovingly and tenderly with the souls around him, and wherever a letter could reach them.
Amongst his friends and correspondents were men and women in all classes, and in many Christian sects. It is pleasant to find amongst them the Countess of 13roich, who inhabited the castle in which so many years before the young Countess Charlotte had spent the days of her lonely girlhood.
The letters of Tersteegen are the more remarkable from their extreme simplicity. For it is the simplicity which relates that which the soul of the writer had seen and heard, not reasoning about that which the mind had worked out, and not merely expressing or describing the impressions of his own heart. They remind us of the simple and innocent descriptions of the travelers of the middle ages, when writing of the strange countries into which they had wandered, and where they had seen and heard many things unknown and unimagined to their fellow-countrymen at home.
Tersteegen lived in the land unknown and unseen to the men of this world—little known and seen even by the Christians around him. He told them, in his childlike manner, of the things so familiar to him, and to many of them so strange and new, of that which had refreshed and gladdened him.
He told them of the fountains and depths springing out of the valleys and hills of that good land into which the Lord had led him ; of the green pastures and still waters in which his Shepherd had made him to lie down and rest. He had nothing to relate of visions or dreams, but he had to tell of the reality of those things of which the lips of his Lord had spoken.
"To walk before God, and in His presence," he said, "is the ground, and the costly jewel of true Christian living. I would have you above all things to grasp this firmly, because, when it is rightly understood and practiced, it includes all else."
He therefore regarded it as his special mission to teach, insist upon, and act upon this neglected truth. He saw all around him that those who believed themselves to be Christians, and in most cases even those who had believed in God, were living practically in ignorance of all that is supernatural in Christian life. They professed to believe in the most stupendous miracles and marvels of long past ages. They professed to believe that the great universe was created by the word of God, that God Himself, in the form of man, had worked as a village carpenter till the time came when He went forth to heal the sick, cast out devils, and raise the dead. They professed to believe that He was crucified and rose again, and that He ascended in His human body into heaven. They professed to believe that God the Holy Ghost had come down from heaven to take the place of the ascended Saviour.
And looking on to the future they professed to believe in miracles and wonders no less tremendous. They repeated with their lips that the dead should arise in their bodies, that Christ should return again from heaven, and they looked forward to being with Him some day in eternal happiness and glory.
But as to the present they regarded themselves as living in an interval between the supernatural past and the supernatural future, except so far as any belief in magic or in ghosts and omens clung to their minds. They attached no solid meaning to such promises of the Lord as they read in John 14:
" If a man love Me, he will keep My words : and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." " He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him." "A little while, and ye shall not see Me : and again, a little while, and ye shall see Me. . .because I go to the Father."
They saw no difference between such a special presence of God as that spoken of in these, and numberless other, passages, and the Omnipresence of God, of which they would perhaps remind their naughty children, as a warning not to do wrong things when out of sight of their parents.
" It is really true," wrote Tersteegen to a friend, " as you expressed it in your last letter, the secret of God's presence is actually believed by very few. But are you aware, that if each one truly believed it, the whole world would at once be filled with saints, and the earth would be truly Paradise ? If men really believed it as they should, there would need nothing more to induce them to give themselves up, heart and soul, to this loving God. But now it is hid from their eyes. Let us pray, my beloved, that God may be made known and manifested to many hearts, and thus in the light of His divine presence the darkness of mere human life may be dispelled, and all things cast away, both without and within the heart, which hinder the growth and life of the soul, and which this light alone discovers and unveils. In all Christian practice there is nothing more universally needful, nothing simpler, sweeter, and more useful, nothing which so sums up in itself all Christian duties in one blessed act, as the realization of the loving presence of God."
"If, dearest friends," he said in one of his sermons, "I had nothing further to speak of than the great truth of the presence of God, I should therein have said all that we have to say to one another as believing Christian people. Oh, the great, the weighty, the touching, the divine truth, not only of the Omnipresence, but also, and above all, of the special inward presence of God in Christ, which must be our all in living, our all in dying.
"All Christian life is comprised in this, to walk in the presence of God. Faith in the inner nearness of our God, in the most blessed name of Jesus Immanuel, leads us on through anything and everything. This is the true Shechinah of the people of God. The least shadow of the manifestation of the Lord Jesus to our hearts, one only touch of His divine love reaching to the center of our being, one single movement of the Spirit of God in the inmost soul, however contemptible such things may be to sense and reason, give more assurance to the soul, and weaken the dominion of the evil one far more, than twenty years of work carried on without conscious abiding in Christ.
" What miracles of divine strength, grace, and love become the experience of the most miserable sinner the moment that, with closed eyes, he sinks down into the depths of the heart of Christ, and thenceforward watches at His gates, waiting at the posts of His doors.
" Love is simply this, to look upon the face of God, and to be looked upon by Him. What is there easier and simpler than to open the eyes and see when the light is all around us ? God is far more really present to us than the light. In Him we live and move and have our being, and He fills the believing soul, steeping it in light. He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Simply to believe this, and to realize it in all our need, is true prayer."
"I sit here and talk to you," he said to Evertsen, "but within my heart is the eternal adoration, unceasing and undisturbed. I thank God that He has given me a little chamber into which no creature has entered besides."
Had the supernatural life ceased for Gerhardt Tersteegen ? Was he living in the waste and barren interval between a past and a future of wonder and of glory ? Or was it that he had entered by faith into the glorious land reached through the death and resurrection of the Lord ? Were those great miracles of the past to lead to nothing in the present, above and beyond the things which the natural eye can see and the natural heart can understand ?
Is it not written, that whilst "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him, God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God."
It was well that the Protestants around him declared their belief in justification by faith only, by the blood of Christ, by the grace of God. But was this justification to lead to nothing more except happiness in heaven by-and-by, and a harmless, moral, and perhaps outwardly useful life now ?
" Tersteegen was careful," writes Goebel, " never to put the truth of justification by faith into the background ; but he was also careful never to separate it from the necessary consequence of holiness and communion with God." To him the secret place of the Most High was the greatest reality, continual intercourse with God not a figure of speech, but the truest of all intercourse.
Why was it that whilst for centuries men had believed in legends and dreams of the imagination, they now looked upon the spiritual intercourse of the child with his Father as some wild enthusiasm ? "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God ; for they are foolishness unto him ; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."
" The children of this world," wrote Hasenkampt, " the miserable men who fain would judge the blessed ones, regarded him as a rhapsodist, a spiritual idler, a self-willed stormer of Babylon,' a schismatic. We know the contrary. The blessed Gerhardt Tersteegen was no rhapsodist. A rhapsodist casts away reason and Scripture, and follows his own imagination. Tersteegen did nothing of the sort. He was a very sensible man—and not only sensible ; he was an enlightened, a holy man, anointed with the Spirit of God, and therefore all the more sensible and sober-minded. He was very much afraid of his own mind and imaginations. The ordinary ways of God he regarded as the surest. In the case of extraordinary things he was unusually careful. I do not know that I ever met a more discreet, a more careful, man in speech and in action. Of his manifold services to the weak, the sick, and the poor, of his untiring industry, though he lived so quiet and retired a life, Mulheim will render an eternal testimony."
It was, therefore, no love of the marvelous, no craving after occult mysteries, which marked Tersteegen. It was simply that he truly believed those great revelations of God, which all the Christians around him professed to believe when they repeated in their confession of faith the tremendous words, 'I believe in the Holy Ghost." Yet to how many of them were the things of the Spirit of God foolishness ! To how many would any man who acted on this belief be a wild enthusiast—if not a lunatic !
" Lord, show me the things that are foolishness to me." This was the first prayer of a French atheist, studying for priest's orders in the Church of Rome. A Testament had been given him in the street ; he opened it at the words, " The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him." " Therefore," he said, "are not some of the things that are foolishness to me the things of God ?" And he went home to pray. He is now a preacher of the gospel of Christ, a witness to the miraculous power which opens the blind eyes, and makes the deaf soul to hear the voice of God.
Let those who rightly crave for something higher than the dead level of man's reason, man's religion, and man's knowledge, turn not to spiritualism, but to the Spirit, who testifies of Jesus ; and enter within the veil into the secret place where the Lord God reveals Himself to all who enter in by faith in the blood of His Son.
It was to be expected that the communion with God which humbled Job would also humble Tersteegen. Often when he had been sitting amongst Christian friends, and speaking with them, he would say when taking leave, " Children, when I sit amongst you it seems to me as if I were unworthy of it. And so must you be taught each one for himself."
Thus did the later years of his life pass on. Constant labour up to the last, and strength gained for it by still hours alone with God. His voice had so failed him that to preach became at last impossible ; he could converse and write, and pray long and fervently for the souls he loved. Henry Sommer said that he would sometimes spend the night in praying, with many tears, for the souls so dear to him.
His friend Hasenkampt writes : " Oh, if the walls of his sitting-room, his bedroom, and his workroom could speak, what would they not have to tell of victories won by fervent prayer ; of secret, holy intercourse with God, ever present with him ; of prayers, intercessions, and supplications for his friends and for others !"
Those who heard his prayers in the meetings, often spoke of the sense of the presence of God which filled them with awe, when he spoke to Him who was so near to him. A short time ago, an old woman was still living at Kronenberg, who had heard in her childhood from her uncle how Tersteegen had once visited Kronenberg. Her uncle could well remember those marvellous prayers. He said, " It seemed to me as if he had gone straight into heaven, and had lost himself in God ; but often, when he had done praying, he was as white as the wall."
It is not Moses alone who has come forth from the presence of God, bearing in his face the glory of heaven. Those who saw Tersteegen knew this ; and even those who had no love for his God and Saviour felt the power of the risen life when they saw him and heard him. A tavern-keeper in Mülheim said to his friend, " When I pass by that man's house, a great awe comes over me of some holy presence. And when I think about him, it has more power over me than many a sermon."
But of himself he said, in preaching to the people of Mülheim, "You can see in me what the Lord God is, who works wonders and miracles, who makes the dead to live, who melts the hard stone, and makes the dry rod to bud and blossom. He has made me a sheep in His pasture, lying down even now in the green meadows of eternal spring ! May the God of mercy grant this grace to all who hear me to-day !"
Lying down in the green pastures, yet working, labouring for his Lord. This was not quietism, but the quietness of the soul at rest in God. "A Christian must be," Tersteegen said, "as a revolving circle, the central point fixed and immovable, whilst at the same time each point of the circumference performs its constant round. Thus, for the Christian, the central point is the still abiding in the presence of God, and with the outer man, with all the powers of body, soul, and spirit, must he ever be occupied in the work of God. But all that is good and divine that is found in our outward life is purely the effect of the supernatural power of God ; therefore it is needful to abide quietly and fixedly in Christ, that this power may be manifested in us. The outer man should move as a door does that is fixed upon its hinge, but move in quietness and without violence, for the door might be wrenched from its hinge by the energy of nature."
This warning was addressed to a friend who had distinguished herself by doing all things, not by halves, but by doubles, in the exuberance of her activity. " God is the center of gravity for the spiritual life ; if force is used, we may be diverted from our center, but the simple, childlike soul will return to its equilibrium, letting go all that draws it aside."
" Once did I seek the time and place
For stillness and for prayer ;
Now everywhere I see His Face,
Secluded everywhere."