“O Lord! all our ills come from not fixing our eyes on Thee: if we looked at nothing else but where we are going we should soon arrive, but we fall a thousand times and stumble and go astray because we do not keep our gaze bent on Him Who is the ‘Way.’”

So great were the charity and fervour of this Mother, such her solicitude for the perfection of her daughters, that she did not content herself with the good example and the instructions she gave while alive, but wished that, even after her death, her words might remain and continue the work she had begun on earth. As one truly hungering after our Lord, and greatly experienced in all that concerns the religious life, she wrote the advice and the explanations contained in this book, so that the sadness caused to the nuns by her bodily absence might be counterbalanced by her spiritual presence; for indeed she seems living even in the dead letters. This, then, is one of the consolations with which her spiritual daughters may alleviate the sorrow caused by her death; another being the certainty that, where she now is, she will not abandon those whom she so ardently loved, because, so far from being less, charity is much greater in heaven than on earth.

It is no small consolation to see, albeit after her death, her spirit still alive in the doctrine of this book, which she composed through zeal for the spiritual improvement of her daughters, and which she earnestly requested me to get printed.

—THEOTONIO DE BRAGANZA
Archbishop of Evora in Portugal