Life & Letters: A Helper and Comforter to Others

Friday, May 14, 2010

A Helper and Comforter to Others

A selection from a letter by Mrs. Henry Smith, a close friend of Elizabeth Prentiss, to Mr. Prentiss, four months after the death of his dear wife. Elizabeth Prentiss was the author of the beloved hymn, More Love to Thee, O Christ, and the book, Stepping Heavenward, used by God to help many a weary saint traveling on their way to glory. Mrs. Smith reflects on the character of her friend. The letter was written January 2, 1879.

How naturally, modestly, almost indifferently, she received the tributes which poured in upon her! Yet, though she cared little for praise, she cared much for love, and for the consciousness that she was a helper and comforter to others.

More Love to Thee: The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss, George Lewis Prentiss, reprinted by Solid Ground Christian Books, p. 289.

2 comments:

Predestined said...: Greetings, brother Dean.
Good to see your continued project coming along. These are truly precious snippets. Blessings,
Doros; May 20, 2010 at 9:04 PM
Dean Olive said...: Thanks for your kind comments. The bits and pieces from letters are a great encouragement to me; I am glad they are to you and trust them will be to all who read them.

Every blessing!; May 21, 2010 at 8:29 AM

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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, May 14, 2010

A Helper and Comforter to Others

2 comments:

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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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