Life & Letters: Less Than Nothing and Vanity

Friday, January 30, 2009

Less Than Nothing and Vanity

A selection from a letter by Augusta Toplady to someone who had written him with words of admiration. He responded with a personal assessment of himself. The letter was written November 2, 1777.

Madam,

Your letter quite distresses me, because it places excellencies to my account which I feel myself to be totally unpossessed of. Among all the weak and unworthy servants of Christ, I am the unworthiest and the weakest. If you know me as well as I know myself, you would be entirely of my mind.

For the Lord’s sake let us look to Jesus only, and learn to cease from man. Christ is all in all. Every other person and thing are vile, and wretched, and hateful, but so far as he deigns to smile and bless. “Less than nothing and vanity” is the only motto that belongs to me. If he vouchsafe to wash me in his blood, and to save me by his infinitely free and glorious redemption; a more worthless and helpless sinner will never sing his praises in the land of glory.

Instead of commending me, pray for me; that I may be kept from evil, and devote my few days (in humble and earnest attempt at least) to the honour of his name…

The Works of Augustus Toplady, Bookshelf Publications, reprint from the 1794 edition, p. 878.

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Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Friday, January 30, 2009

Less Than Nothing and Vanity

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Why Life & Letters?

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

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