1. Matt. 7:14: ‘Want de poort is eng, en de weg is naauw’ (Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way).
2. Pray and work (a Benedictine rule that has become a popular saying).
3. Cf. Eccl. 9:10.
4. A combination of Matt. 7:11 and Luke 10:42.
5. Prov. 3:5.
6. An allusion to the Lord’s Prayer.
7. This is 2 Cor. 5:17 in both the Dutch ‘Statenvertaling’ and the King James bible.
8. Van Gogh’s resolution to dispose of nearly all his books displays striking similarities to the decision of Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s novel The mill on the Floss. As fate would have it, she comes under the spell of The imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, and, of all her books, keeps only this work, the Bible and a hymnal: ‘she flung away the books with a sort of triumph that she had risen above the need of them, and if they had been her own, she would have burned them, believing that she would never repent. She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-à-Kempis, and the “Christian Year” ..., that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of her new faith, to need any other material for her mind to work on’. Ed. Leipzig 1860 (2 vols.), vol. 2, book iv, 3, pp. 26-34 (quotation on p. 33). It is likely that Van Gogh read this novel, although he never mentions the title; another reference to the book is a passage quoted in letter 294.
9. Money for framing the prints for Mrs van Gogh’s birthday; see letter 45, ll. 29-30.
a. Means: ‘de deur niet plat lopen’. Vincent here warns Theo not always to go knocking at Borchers’s door.
10. The quotation begins with 1 Cor. 2:2 and continues with 1 Cor. 2:4-5.
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