My dear L.,

Tamper with no physicians, but content yourself, to have that share of health, which a regular and good life can help you to. Reflect not upon your predominant complexion, or how long it will be, before you get from under its power. St. Paul wanted to be delivered from his thorn in the flesh. He had all he prayed for, though the thorn might continue, when God said to him, “My grace is sufficient for thee”; this was better to him, than if his thorn had been taken from him. This enabled him to say, “I will glory in my infirmities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.” You believe, that if it was not for earnest and continual prayers, your turn to melancholy would get the better of you. You cannot believe this too much, for nothing else can preserve you, from being led away by every other evil temper. But let resignation to God, be the predominant part of your spirit of prayer; it is not so much ardent desires, as humble resignation to be as God pleases, that keeps the heart in the highest union with him. Faith and hope and love get their best strength, and work their highest work, when resignation is the salt wherewith they are seasoned.

You think, if you were to live an hundred years in an abstracted contemplation, some property of nature, would still be occasionally breaking forth in you. What occasion had you, my friend, to make this complaint about such a contemplation?

You have no business with it, nor any reason to expect it should do anything for you. Had you changed your words, and said, I believe if I were for a hundred years to be wholly trusting in, and depending upon God, to do that for me, which he has promised to do for all that trust in him, it would not be done: Had you expressed your complaint in these words, you would have seen, that neither faith, nor hope, nor love, nor resignation, would have allowed you to make it. Look at yourself, at the power of time, or anything that this or that complexion does, and then you may be afraid of everything; but look at God, as him that is to do all for you, and in you, and then you need be afraid of nothing. A thorn, or no thorn, bad or good blood, with all its effects, lose all their difference, as soon as you know, that you are not your own, nor left to yourself, nor where to seek a physician, that will not leave you unhealed.

We know that all things must work together for good, to them that love God. Now what signifies what the things are, if we are to have the same good from them, be they what they will? Let complexion show itself, let the dead ashes of old sins, seem to be ready to come to life again, what is all this, but helping us to be more alive unto God? Flesh will be flesh as long as we live, but every state of the flesh may help us to grow in the Spirit. Therefore rejoice evermore, in everything give thanks, and call nothing but this, abstracted contemplation.