Santa Teresa | Page 2

oldest
and best blood of Spain mantled in her cheek and shone in her eye. A
lion encompassed by crosses was one of the quarters of her father's coat
of arms. And Teresa took that up and added out of it a new glory to all
her father's hereditary honours. For his daughter was all her days a
lioness palisaded round with crosses, till by means of them she was
transformed into a lamb. But, all the time, the lioness was still lurking
there. Teresa's was one of those sovereign souls that are born from time
to time as if to show us what our race was created for at first, and for
what it is still destined. She was a queen among women. She was in
intellect the complete equal, and in still better things than intellect far
the superior, of Isabella and Elizabeth themselves. As she says in an
outspoken autobiographic passage, hers was one of those outstanding
and towering souls on which a thousand eyes and tongues are
continually set without any one understanding them or comprehending
them. Her coming greatness of soul is foreseen by some of her
biographers in the attempt which she made while yet a child to escape
away into the country of the Moors in search of an early martyrdom, so
that she might see her Saviour all the sooner, and stand in His presence
all the purer. 'A woman,' says Crashaw, 'for angelical height of
speculation: for masculine courage of performance, more than a woman;
who, while yet a child, outran maturity, and durst plot a martyrdom.
Scarce had she learnt to lisp the name Of martyr, yet she thinks it
shame Life should so long sport with that breath, Which, spent, can buy
so brave a death.
Scarce had she blood enough to make A guilty sword blush for her sake;
Yet has she heart dares hope to prove How much less strong is death
than love.
Be love but there, let poor six years Be posed with the maturest fears
Man trembles at, we straight shall find Love knows no nonage, nor the
mind.'
Teresa's mother died just when her daughter was at that dangerous age
in which a young girl needs a wise mother most; 'the age when virtue

should begin to grow,' as she says herself. Teresa was an
extraordinarily handsome and attractive young lady, and the knowledge
of that, as she tells us, made her very vain, and puffed up her heart with
foolish imaginations. She has a powerful chapter in the opening of her
Autobiography on dangerous companionships in the days of youth. 'Oh
that all parents would take warning by me, and would look carefully
into their children's early friendships!' She suffered terribly from bad
health all her days, and that severe chastisement began to fall on her
while she was yet a beautiful girl. It was a succession of serious
illnesses, taken along with her father's scrupulous care over her, that
brought Teresa back to the simple piety of her early childhood, and
fixed her for life in an extraordinary devotion to God, and to all the
things of God. When such a change of heart and character comes to a
young woman among ourselves, she usually seeks out some career of
religion and charity to which she can devote her life. She is found
labouring among the poor and the sick and the children of the poor, or
she goes abroad to foreign mission work. In Teresa's land and day a
Religious House was the understood and universal refuge for any
young woman who was in earnest about her duty to God and to her
own soul. In those Houses such young women secluded themselves
from all society and gave themselves up to the care of the poor and the
young. In the more strict and enclosed of those retreats the inmates
never came out of doors at all, but wholly sequestered themselves up to
a secret life of austerity and prayer. This was the ideal life led in those
Houses for religious women. But Teresa soon found out the
tremendous mistake she had made in leaving her father's
family-fireside for a so-called Religious House. No sooner had she
entered it than she was plunged headlong into those very same
'pestilent amusements,' the mere approach of which had made her flee
to this supposed asylum. Though she is composing her Autobiography
under the sharp eyes of her confessors, and while she is writing with a
submissiveness and, indeed, a servility that is her only weakness,
Teresa at the same time is bold enough and honest enough to tell us her
own experiences of monastic life in language of startling strength and
outspokenness. 'A short-cut to hell. If parents would take my advice,
they