Treatise on the Love of God

It is not a book, like other spiritual books, treating only a section or a single element of the devout life, but it is one by which and on which the whole spiritual life can be formed; it is, with the “Introduction to a Devout Life,” a perfect book, a “complete food,” containing all the ingredients necessary for spiritual sustenance. It contains in the first place an immense mass of instruction, dogmatic and moral, on the science of the love of God. It treats not only in broad outline but also in subtle detail of God and the soul, this world and the world to come, grace and free-will, holiness and sin, commandments and counsels, ordinary virtue and perfection, all questions of prayer; it treats the virtues in detail, not only the virtue of charity in all its parts, but also faith, hope and fear, zeal, obedience, resignation.