Life & Letters: Little Longer to Remain Below

Monday, February 23, 2009

Little Longer to Remain Below

A selection from a letter by Benjamin Morgan Palmer to a lifelong friend in Maryland. Mr. Palmer was sick and thought he was soon the leave his earthly tabernacle and enter the presence of the Lord. He would live another 13 years but when he wrote this letter on February 20, 1889, he believed his earthly sojourn would soon be over. The words are fitting for all believers for our death may be nearer than we know.

We have little longer to remain below; soon we are to be caught up into the splendor of our Lord’s own presence. Let us carry up with us into that supreme glory the remembrance of a communion with our heavenly Father, such as we have never known before; leaving the light of our testimony for Christ, which shall help those who remain after us to find the way to the bright heaven which is our home forever.

The Life and Letters of Benjamin Morgan Palmer, by Thomas Cary Johnson, first published in 1906, reprinted by The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987, p. 577.

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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"

Monday, February 23, 2009

Little Longer to Remain Below

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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"

A Sample Letter

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