Tres Christian meditations which are the fruit of much reflection will be slowly but also easily understood, although they will certainly prove very difficult to anyone who by a cursory and merely inquisitive reading makes them so. “That individual” who first considers whether he will read them or not, should he finally decide to read them, will sympathetically consider whether the difficulty and the ease, when these are thoughtfully weighed on the balance, are rightly proportioned to one another, so that the Christian idea may not be given a false weight by making the difficulty or the ease too great.
They are “Christian reflections,” and therefore not about love, but about the works of love. They concern the works of love, not as if all its works were herein enumerated and described, far from it; not as if the particular works herein described were now described once for all—praise God, that is impossible! For that which in its whole wealth is essentially inexhaustible, is also in its least expression essentially indescribable, because it is essentially present everywhere in its wholeness, and essentially incapable of being described.