Santa Teresa | Page 3

would rather marry their daughters to the very poorest of men, or
else keep them at home under their own eye. If young women will be

wicked at home, their wickedness will not long be hidden at home; but
in monasteries, such as I speak of, their worst wickedness can be
completely covered up from every human eye. And all the time the
poor things are not to blame. They only walk in the way that is shown
them. Many of them are to be much pitied, for they honestly wish to
withdraw from the world, only to find themselves in ten times worse
worlds of sensuality and all other devilry. O my God! if I might I
would fain speak of some of the occasions of sin from which Thou
didst deliver me, and how I threw myself into them again. And of the
risks I ran of utterly shipwrecking my character and good name and
from which Thou didst rescue me. O Lord of my soul! how shall I be
able to magnify Thy grace in those perilous years! At the very time that
I was offending Thee most, Thou didst prepare me by a most profound
compunction to taste of the sweetness of Thy recoveries and
consolations. In truth, O my King, Thou didst administer to me the
most spiritual and painful of chastisements: for Thou didst chastise my
sins with great assurances of Thy love and of Thy great mercy. It
makes me feel beside myself when I call to mind Thy great grace and
my great ingratitude.'
This leads us up to the conception and commencement of that great
work to which Teresa dedicated the whole of her after life,--the
reformation and extension of the Religious Houses of Spain. The
root-and-branch reformation of Luther and his German and Swiss
colleagues had not laid much hold on Spain; and the little hold it had
laid on her native land had never reached to Teresa. Had Luther and
Teresa but met: had Melanchthon and Teresa but met: had the best
books of the German and Swiss Reformation but come into Teresa's
hands: had she been somewhat less submissive, and somewhat less
obedient, and somewhat less completely the slave of her ecclesiastical
superiors; had she but once entered into that intellectual and spiritual
liberty wherewith Christ makes His people free,--what a lasting
blessing Teresa might have been made to her native land! But, as it was,
Teresa's reformation, while it was the salvation of herself and of
multitudes more who came under it, yet as a monastic experiment and a
church movement, it ended in the strengthening and the perpetuation of
that detestable system of intellectual and spiritual tyranny which has

been the death of Spain from that day to this. Teresa performed a
splendid service inside the Church to which she belonged: but that
service was wholly confined to the Religious Houses that she founded
and reformed. Teresa's was intended to be a kind of
counter-reformation to the reformation of Luther and Melanchthon and
Valdes and Valera. And such was the talent and the faith and the
energy she brought to bear on the work she undertook, that, had it been
better directed, it might have been blessed to preserve her beloved
native land at the head of modern Christendom. But, while that was not
to be, it is the immense talent, and the unceasing toil, and the splendid
faith and self-surrender that Teresa brought to bear on her intramural
reformation; and, all through that, on the working out of her own
salvation,--it is all these things that go to make Teresa's long life so
memorable and so impressive, not only in her own age and land and
church, but wherever greatness of mind, and nobleness of heart, and
sanctity of life, and stateliness of character are heard of and are
esteemed.
Teresa's intellect, her sheer power of mind, is enough of itself to make
her an intensely interesting study to all thinking men. No one can open
her books without confessing the spell of her powerful understanding.
Her books, before they were books, absolutely captivated and
completely converted to her unpopular cause many of her most
determined enemies. Again and again and again we find her confessors
and her censors admitting that both her spiritual experiences and her
reformation work were utterly distasteful and very stumbling to them
till they had read her own written account, first of her life of prayer and
then of her reformation work. One after another of such men, and some
of them the highest in learning and rank and godliness, on reading her
autobiographic papers, came over to be her fearless defenders and fast
friends. There is nothing more delightful in all her delightful
Autobiography, and in the fine 'censures' that have