Though written originally at odd intervals and in a desultory fashion, the chapters of this book admirably combine to illustrate certain proportions between the temporal and the eternal in questions arising from the doctrine of the Cross. To the serious mind life has many mysteries; the counsels of God seem often inconsistent with human logic, and our hopes and efforts of charity are at times in apparent conflict with our faith. Thus it has come about that whilst in the letter we accept the maxims of the Gospel, in our interpretation and appreciation of them we affect to see the impossible; we minimize and explain away whatever is hard to human nature in the law of Christ, until we have reduced the Cross to a crutch by which we seek to sustain our weakness without testing our spirit of sacrifice. Father Tyrrell opposes the aim of those who with false kindness have mitigated the hard sayings of Christ and prophesied smooth things. He brings into closer view for us the Church, who, with all her human frailty, ever shrinking from the stern ideal of the Cross, from the bitterness of the chalice of her Passion, when asked, has but one ruthless answer, namely, that it is only through many tribulations that we can enter the Kingdom of God. She teaches indeed that Christs yoke is easy, not because it is painless, but because love makes the pain welcome. In this spirit the author treats various problems of life, such as faith in its relation to reason, sorrow and pain in their relation to happiness, virtue and sin with their inexplicable lights and shadows crossing human days. Throughout there is the melody of the Exercises of St. Ignatius, like an echo from Manresa, helping us to understand what reason alone would misinterpret, since wisdom comes through the heart as much as through the mind.
The book is all the more timely in these days, when not only the obtrusive comforts of life, but modern biblical criticism and a liberal tendency in theology lend themselves to weaken those doctrines of Christianity which war upon the weaknesses of human nature and the spirit of self-indulgence. It is an antidote to the preaching of those modern evangelists who would change the law of the Gospel by explaining away its severity, rather than insist that we should change our lives to conform to that law, and thus subvert the pleasant dogmas of society or of individual self-deception. But Father Tyrrell also knows how to deal with his subject in an attractive manner. His topics, such as The Soul and Her Spouse?the Hidden Life?Sin Judged by Faith? Sin Judged by Reason?The Gospel of Pain?The Way of the Counsels ?Idealism, its Use and Abuse, etc., give in their very titles a glimpse of the style in which he discusses the different mysteries of life, the study of which often loses its legitimate charm, even to the serious mind, when treated in a purely didactic fashion, or with an apparent effort of sentimental exhortation.
--American Ecclesiastical Review, Volume 20