I have anywhere met with. ‘That cool-headed business woman . . . that admirable psychologist and of superhuman lucidity . . . that magnificent and over-awing saint . . . she has verified in her own case the supernatural experiences of the greatest mystics,—such are her unparalleled experiences in the supernatural domain. . . . Teresa goes deeper than any like writer into the unexplored regions of the soul. She is the geographer and hydrographer of the sinful soul. She has drawn the map of its poles, marked its latitudes of contemplation and prayer, and laid out all the interior seas and lands of the human heart. Other saints have been among those heights and depths and deserts before her, but no one has left us so methodical and so scientific a survey.’ Were it for nothing else, the chapters on mystical literature in M. Huysmans’ unfinished trilogy would make it a valued possession to every student of the soul of man under sin and under salvation. I await the completion of his Pilgrim’s Progress with great impatience and with great expectation.
And then, absolutely possessed as Teresa always is by the most solemn subjects,—herself, her sin, her Saviour, her original method of prayer and her unshared experiences in prayer,—she showers upon us continually
gleams and glances of the sunniest merriment, amid all her sighs and tears. She roasts in caustic the gross-minded, and the self-satisfied, and the self-righteous, as Socrates himself never roasted them better. Again, like his, her irony and her raillery and her satire are sometimes so delicate that it quite eludes you for the first two or three readings of the exquisite page. And then, when you turn the leaf, she is as ostentatiously stupid and ignorant and dependent on your superior mind as ever Socrates himself was. Till I shrewdly suspect that no little of that ‘obedience’ which so intoxicated and fascinated her inquisitors, and which to this day so exasperates some of her biographers, was largely economical and ironical. Her narrow cell is reported to have often resounded with peals of laughter to the scandal of some of her sisters. In support of all that, I have marked a score of Socratic passages in Woodhead, and Dalton, and Lewis, and Father Coleridge, and Mrs. Cunninghame Graham. They are very delicious passages and very tempting. But were they once begun there would be no end to them. You will believe Froude, for he is an admitted judge in all matters connected with the best literature, and he says
in his Quarterly article on Teresa’s writings, ‘The best satire of Cervantes is not more dainty.’
The great work to which Teresa gave up her whole life, after her full conversion, was the purification of the existing monastic system, and the multiplication and extension of Religious Houses of the strictest, severest, most secluded, most prayerful, and most saintly life. She had been told by those she too much trusted, that the Church of Christ was being torn in pieces in Germany, and in Switzerland, and in France, and in England by a great outbreak of heretical error; and, while the Society of Jesus and the Secret Inquisition were established to cope with all such heresy, Teresa set herself to counteract it by a widespread combination of unceasing penance and intercessory prayer. It was a zeal without knowledge; but there can be no doubt about the sincerity, the single-mindedness, and the strength of the zeal. For forty as hard-working years as ever any woman spent in this world, Teresa laboured according to her best light to preserve the purity and the unity of the Church of Christ. And the strength and the sagacity of mind, the tact, the business talents, the tenacity of will, the patience, the endurance, the perseverance,
the sleepless watchfulness, and the abounding prayerfulness that she brought to bear on the reformation and multiplication of her fortresses of defence and attack in that holy war, all taken together, make up one of the most remarkable pages in the whole history of the Church of Christ. Her difficulties with Rome, with the Inquisition, with her more immediate superiors, confessors, and censors, and, most of all, with the ignorance, the stupidity, the laziness, the malice, and the lies of those monks and nuns whose reformation she was determined on: her endless journeys: her negotiations with church-leaders, landowners, and tradesmen in selecting and securing sites, and in erecting new religious houses: the adventures, the accidents, the entertainments she met with: and the fine temper, the good humour, the fascinating character, the winning manners she everywhere exhibited; and, withal, her incomparable faith in the Living God, and the exquisite inwardness, unconquerable assurance, and abounding fruitfulness of her own and unshared method and secret of prayer,—had Teresa not lived and died in Spain, and had she not spent her life and done her work under the Roman obedience, her name would have been a household word
in Scotland. As it is, she is not wholly unknown or unloved. And as knowledge extends, and love, and good-will; and as suspicion, and fear, and retaliation, and party-spirit die out among us, the truth about Teresa and multitudes more will become established on clearer and deeper and broader foundations; and we shall be able to hail both her and multitudes more like her as our brothers and sisters in Christ, whom hitherto we have hated and despised because we did not know them, and had been poisoned against them. I am a conspicuous case in point myself. And when I have been conquered by a little desultory reading and by a little effort after love no man need despair. And if you will listen to this lecture with a good and honest heart: with a heart that delights to hear all this good report about a fellow-believer: then He who has begun that good work in you will perfect it by books and by lectures like this, and far better than this, till you are taken absolutely captive to that charity which rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth: and which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Follow after charity, and begin with Santa Teresa.
Forbid it, mighty Love, let no fond hate
Of names or words so far prejudicate;
Souls are not Spaniards too; one friendly flood
Of baptism blends them all into one blood.
What soul soe’er in any language can
Speak heaven like hers, is my soul’s countryman.
But the greatest and the best talent that God gives to any man or woman in this world is the talent of prayer. And the best usury that any man or woman brings back to God when He comes to reckon with them at the end of this world is a life of prayer. And those servants best put their Lord’s money to the exchangers who rise early and sit late, as long as they are in this world, ever finding out and ever following after better and better methods of prayer, and ever forming more secret, more steadfast, and more spiritually fruitful habits of prayer: till they literally pray without ceasing, and till they continually strike out into new enterprises in prayer, and new achievements, and new enrichments. It was this that first drew me to Teresa. It was her singular originality in prayer and her complete captivity to prayer. It was the time she spent in prayer, and the refuge, and the peace, and the sanctification, and the power for carrying on hard and unrequited work that she all her life found in prayer. It was her fidelity and her
utter surrender of herself to this first and last of all her religious duties, till it became more a delight, and, indeed, more an indulgence, than a duty. With Teresa it was prayer first, and prayer last, and prayer always. With Teresa literally all things were sanctified, and sweetened, and made fruitful by prayer. In Teresa’s writings prayer holds much the same place that it holds in the best men and women of Holy Scripture. If I were to say that about some of the ladies of the Scottish Covenant, you would easily believe me. But you must believe me when I tell you that about a Spanish lady, second to none of them in holiness of life, even if her holy life is not all cast in our mould. All who have read the autobiographic Apologia will remember the fine passage in which its author tells us that ever since his conversion there have been two, and only two, absolutely self-luminous beings in the whole universe of being to him,—God and his own soul. Now, I do not remember that Newman even once speaks about Teresa in any of his books, but I always think of him and her together in this great respect. God is to them both, and to them both He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. And it is just here, at the very commencement and centre of divine things, that we all make