not to teach, but to learn. I will speak to Thee, who am but dust and ashes.’ And all the time set before the eyes of your soul Jesus Christ crucified, and ruminate on Him in some such way as this. Fix your eyes on that stupendous humility of His whereby He so annihilated Himself. Look on His head crowned with thorns. Fix your eyes on His nailed hands, His feet, and His side. Meditate on and interrogate every one of His wounds for you. It behoves you also to go to prayer with a most entire resignation and submission and pliantness to go that way in religion and in life that God points out to you. Sometimes He will teach you by turning His back on you: and, anon, by lifting up the light of His countenance upon you. Sometimes by shutting you out of His presence, and sometimes by bringing you into His banqueting-house. And you are to receive it all with the same equability of mind, knowing that He always acts for the best. Otherwise you will go to teach God in your prayers, which is not the proper scope and intent of prayer at all. And when you say that you are dust and ashes, you must observe and exhibit the proper quality of such. In our Lord’s prayer in the garden, He requested that the bitterness and the terrible trial He felt in overcoming His human nature might be taken away. He did not ask that His pains might be taken away, but only the disgust wherewith He suffered them. And when it was answered Him that it was not expedient but that He should drink that cup, He had to master that weakness and pusillanimity of the flesh, as must all other men. One cannot be a
great scholar, or even a finished courtier, without great pains and expense; and to be a scholar in the Church, and a minister, and a master in the science of Heaven, cannot be done without long time at school and much hard work. And herewith I desist from saying more to your lordship, whose pardon I beg for all this presumption. Which, however full it may be of defects and indiscretions, is not wanting in that zeal I owe to your service as one of the most wandering and gone astray of your lordship’s flock. Our Lord preserve your lordship, and enrich you with the manifold increase of His grace. I am, your lordship’s unworthy servant and subject, Teresa of Jesus.
(12) The proper Readers of what the Saint has Written,—And now I return most humbly to beseech your Reverence, that, if you mean to impart to any one these things that you have made me write concerning prayer, let them be imparted to spiritual persons, and to persons of real insight only. For, indeed, I have written for persons of exceptional experience and exceptional prudence only. What I have written, I fear, very few are capable of. But what am I, to speak thus about any but myself? Farewell.—I am,
Teresa the Sinner.