Santa Teresa | Page 4

been preserved
concerning it, than to read of the great and learned theologians, the
responsible church leaders, and even the secret inquisitors who came
under the charm of her character and the spell of her pen. 'She
electrifies the will,' confessed one of the best judges of good writing in
her day. And old Bishop Palafox's tribute to Teresa is far too beautiful

to be withheld. 'What I admire in her is the peace, the sweetness, and
the consolation with which in her writings she draws us toward the best,
so that we find ourselves captured rather than conquered, imprisoned
rather than prisoners. No one reads the saint's writings who does not
presently seek God, and no one through her writings seeks God who
does not remain in love with the saint. I have not met with a single
spiritual man who does not become a passionate admirer of Santa
Teresa. But her writings do not alone impart a rational, interior, and
superior love, but a love at the same time practical, natural, and
sensitive; and my own experience proves it to me that there exists no
one who loves her but would, if the saint were still in this world, travel
far to see and speak with her.' I wish much I could add to that Peter of
Alcantara's marvellous analysis of Teresa's experiences and character.
Under thirty-three heads that great saint sums up Teresa's character,
and gives us a noble, because all unconscious, revelation of his own.
And though Teresa has been dead for three hundred years, she speaks
to this day in that same way: and that too in quarters in which we
would little expect to hear her voice. In that intensely interesting novel
of modern Parisian life, En Route, Teresa takes a chief part in the
conversion and sanctification of the prodigal son whose return to his
father's house is so powerfully depicted in that story. The deeply read
and eloquent author of that remarkable book gives us some of the best
estimates and descriptions of Santa Teresa that 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