INTRODUCTION.
The following meditations will probably rank high among many similar works which the contemplative love of Jesus has produced; but it is our duty here plainly to affirm that they have no pretensions whatever to be regarded as history.1 They are but intended to take one of the lowest places among those numerous representations of the Passion which have been given us by pious writers and artists, and to be considered at the very utmost as the Lenten meditations of a devout nun, related in all simplicity, and written down in the plainest and most literal language, from her own dictation.

To these meditations, she herself never attached more than a mere human value, and never related them except through obedience, and upon the repeated commands of the directors of her conscience.
The writer of the following pages was introduced to this holy religious by Count Leopold de Stolberg.

(The Count de Stolberg is one of the most eminent converts whom the Catholic Church has made from Protestantism.

He died in 1819.) Dean Bernard Overberg, her director extraordinary, and Bishop Michael Sailer, who had often been her counsellor and consoler, urged her to relate to us in detail all that she experienced; and the latter, who survived her, took the deepest interest in the arrangement and publication of the notes taken down from her dictation.

(The Bishop of Ratisbonne, one of the most celebrated defenders of the faith in Germany.) These illustrious and holy men, now dead, and whose memory is blessed, were in continual communion of prayer with Anne Catherine, whom they loved and respected, on account of the singular graces with which God had favoured her.