The subject of the treatise was suggested, as is plain from the text itself, as the result of a public, or at any rate semi-public, discussion with some person unknown in which St. Bernard, strongly commending the work of grace, had seemed to lay himself open to the charge of unduly minimizing the function of free will. There is about the treatise the fragrance of mystical theology; not the mystical theology of the esoteric, but that of the simple Christian living in the world. It is wonderful how this ascetic, this cloistered recluse, touches his subject with the hand of one who knows the pulsations of average humanity. (Modified from introduction)