It was at Cordova that Father Lewis wrote his first book. The quiet and solitude of the convent enabled him to devote more time to writing than he would have been able to do had he continued his apostolic journeys among the towns and villages of Spain. His first work was the celebrated "Treatise on Prayer and Meditation." Nicolas Antoine, a learned author, says of this work that of "all books of its kind, in any tongue or of any time, it deserves the first place." It soon became famous, and was even read by the Mahometan inhabitants of Spain, deadly enemies to Christianity as they were. In his preface to " The Introduction to the Creed," a later work, he himself tells how it worked the conversion of one of those infidels, a Moorish slave, called Hamelsi, who, touched by grace, after reading the " Treatise on Prayer," asked for baptism, and became a pious Christian. Lives of the some of the Sons of Dominic (1883)
St. Rose of Lima's favorite book of Ven. Louis was The Book of Prayer and Meditation--a book that laments the miseries of life and manifests spiritual contempt for the world. Once, she banished the devil's temptations by reading this book causing the devil to snatch the book from her and throw it onto a rubbish heap. Rose remained calm, certain that the Lord would return it to her, and she got it back.
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