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TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS
PRINCESS AND LADY,
Lady MAGDALENA SIBYLLA,
MARRIED DUCHESS OF SAXE-GOTHA,
BORN PRINCESS OF SAXONY, JULICH,
CLEVES, AND BERG, LANDGRAVINE OF THURINGIA,
MARGRAVINE OF MEISSEN, ALSO UPPER AND
LOWER LUSATIA, COUNTESS OF THE MARK,
RAVENSBERG AND BARBY, LADY OF
RAVENSTEIN, etc.
OUR MOST GRACIOUS PRINCESS AND LADY.
MOST ILLUSTRIOUS PRINCESS, MOST GRACIOUS LADY,
The love of God has bound and obligated mankind most powerfully to love Him in return. For God, above all His proven benefits done for us, wants primarily to be loved. God, who is love itself, gives Himself to us, so that we may live and move in Him original: "Act. 17: 28"; so that we can also love Him in this way. original: "1 Joh. 4: 8, 16" If we now want to live in God, we must not let ourselves be put to shame by the lifeless creatures. All waters flow to that Ocean from which they had taken their original fluidity. The moist vapors,
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which rise from the earth and divide themselves in the clouds, fall again upon the earth to sprinkle and moisten this, their mother. The hardest stones, which can do nothing else, throw their received rays of the sun back to their source. And these are all inanimate creatures. What then must man not do, in whose ingenious soul God's Image reveals itself? What must a Christian heart not do, which God has built as His Temple of the Holy Spirit? original: "1 Cor. 6: 19" Surely, in this person, Divine love must burn like an eternal Torch, and yearn from the earthly toward the heavenly kingdom. This love originates from heaven, therefore it must also burn with fervor toward heaven as its fatherland, and indeed in such a way that many waters cannot quench it, nor the streams drown it. original: "Cant. 8: 7"
The now already blessed Lord D. HENRICUS MULLER Doctor Heinrich Müller, 1631 to 1675, the author of this work, who has been snatched away from us—oh, how inconsolable!—by an all too early and untimely death, our respectively heartily beloved and highly esteemed Husband and Father: how greatly he always applied himself to the pure, unadulterated love of God. As an upright shepherd of souls, he properly walked before his sheep, entrusted to him by God, in the love of Christ. He gave various striking proofs of this even on his deathbed and in his hour of death. For after the illness, as a harbinger of death, had now and then thrown him onto his sickbed before his final illness, he burned from time to time more and more with Divine praise in a heavenly