Although Teresa of Avila lived and wrote four centuries ago, her superbly inspiring classic on the practice of prayer is as fresh today as it was when she first wrote it. Counsels and directives to attain spiritual perfection.

Through the entire Way of Perfection runs St Teresa's desire to love prayer, the most effective means of attaining virtue. She treats of the three essentials of the prayer-filled life - mutual life, detachment from created things, and true humanity - and then, at length, of the themes of prayer and contemplation themselves.

In the final part of her book - the most easy comprehensible of all her writings, and one that can be read with profit by more people than any of her other books - she provides one of the classic commentaries on the Lord's Prayer.