In Treatise on the Love of God, St. Francis de Sales guides the reader through deepening their relationship with God. He focuses on the importance of cultivating virtue to grow in love for God; his method of the spiritual life is called “the Way of Divine Love.”
Born in the Duchy of Savoy, St. Francis de Sales was the Bishop of Geneva in the early 17th century.
Click here to read a pdf of Treatise on the Love of God.
Excerpts From Treatise on the Love of God
“Prayer is a manna, for the infinity of delicious tastes and precious sweetnesses which it gives to such as use it, but it is hidden, because it falls before the light of any science, in the mental solitude where the soul alone treats with her God alone.”
“This heart in love with its God, desiring infinitely to love, sees notwithstanding that it can neither love nor desire sufficiently.”
“How happy is the soul who in the tranquillity of her heart lovingly preserves the sacred feeling of God’s presence!”
“He was united to our human nature by grace, as a vine to its elm, to make it in some sort participate in his fruit; but seeing this union undone by Adam’s sin, he made another more close and pressing union in the Incarnation, whereby human nature remains for ever joined in personal unity to the Divinity; and to the end that not human nature only, but that every man might be intimately united with his goodness, he instituted the Sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, in which every one may participate, to unite his Saviour to himself really and by way of food.”