Santa Teresa | Page 7

has all these transcendent promises spoken
and sealed to it. By her life of faith and prayer and personal holiness,
Teresa made herself 'capable of God,' as one describes it, and God
came to her and filled her with Himself to her utmost capacity, as He
said He would. At the same time, much as I trust and honour and love
Teresa, and much good as she has been made of God to me, she was
still, at her best, but an imperfectly sanctified woman, and her rewards
and experiences were correspondingly imperfect. But if a holy life
before such manifestations were made to her, and a still holier life after
them--if that is any test of the truth and reality of such transcendent and
supernatural matters,--on her own humble and adoring testimony, and
on the now extorted and now spontaneous testimony of absolutely all
who lived near her, still more humility, meekness, lowly- mindedness,
heavenly-mindedness and prayerfulness demonstrably followed those
inward and spiritual revelations to her of her Lord. In short and in sure,
ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or
figs of thistles? On the whole, then, I for one am strongly disposed
toward Teresa, even in the much-inculpated matter of her inward voices
and visions. The wish may very possibly be father to the thought: but
my thought leans to Teresa, even in her most astounding locutions and
revelations; they answer so entirely to my reading of our Lord and of
His words. I take sides, on the whole, with those theologians of her day,
who began by doubting, but ended by believing in Teresa and by
imitating her. They were led to rejoice that any contemporary and
fellow-sinner had attained to such fellowship with God: and I am
constrained to take sides with them. 'One day, in prayer, the sweetness
was so great that I could not but contrast it with the place I deserved in

hell. The sweetness and the light and the peace were so great that,
compared with it, everything in this world is vanity and lies. I was
filled with a new reverence for God. I saw His majesty and His power
in a way I cannot describe, and the vision kept me in great tenderness
and joy and humility. I cannot help making much of that which led me
so near to God. I knew at that great moment what it is for a soul to be
in the very presence of God Himself. What must be the condescension
of His majesty seeing that in so short a time He left so great an
impression and so great a blessing on my soul! O my Lord, consider
who she is upon whom Thou art bestowing such unheard-of blessings!
Dost Thou forget that my soul has been an abyss of sin? How is this, O
Lord, how can it be that such great grace has come to the lot of one
who has so ill deserved such things at Thy hands!' He who can read that,
and a hundred passages as good as that, and who shall straightway set
himself to sneer and scoff and disparage and find fault, he is well on the
way to the sin against the Holy Ghost. At any rate, I would be if I did
not revere and love and imitate such a saint of God. Given God and His
Son and His Holy Spirit: given sin and salvation and prayer and a holy
life; and, with many drawbacks, Teresa's was just the life of self-denial
and repentance and prayer and communion with God that we should all
live. It is not Teresa who is to be bemoaned and blamed and called bad
names. It is we who do all that to her who are beside ourselves. It is we
who need the beam to be taken out of our own eye. Teresa was a
mystery and an offence; and, again, an encouragement and an example
to the theologians and the inquisitors of her day just as she still is in our
day. She was a stumbling-stone, or an ensample, according to the
temper and disposition and character of her contemporaries, and she is
the same to-day.
The pressing question with me is not the truth or the falsehood, the
amount of reality or the amount of imagination in Teresa's locutions
and visions. The pressing question with me is this,--Why it is that I
have nothing to show to myself at all like them. I think I could die for
the truth of my Lord's promise that both He and His Father will
manifest Themselves to those who love Him and keep His words; but
He never manifests Himself, to be called manifestation, to me. I am
driven in sheer