Santa Teresa | Page 8

desperation to believe such testimonies and attainments

as those of Teresa, if only to support my failing faith in the words of
my Master. I had rather believe every syllable of Teresa's so-staggering
locutions and visions than be left to this, that ever since Paul and John
went home to heaven our Lord's greatest promises have been so many
idle words. It is open to any man to scoff and sneer at Teresa's
extraordinary life of prayer, and at the manifestations of the Father and
the Son that were made to her in her life of prayer, and some of her
biographers and censors among ourselves have made good use of their
opportunity. But I cannot any longer sit with them in the seat of the
scorner, and I want you all to rise up and leave that evil seat also. Lord,
how wilt Thou manifest Thyself in time to come to me? How shall I
attain to that faith and to that love and to that obedience which shall
secure to me the long- withheld presence and indwelling of the Father
and the Son?
* * * * *
Teresa's Autobiography, properly speaking, is not an autobiography at
all, though it ranks with The Confessions, and The Commedia, and The
Grace Abounding, and The Reliquiae, as one of the very best of that
great kind of book. It is not really Teresa's Life Written by Herself,
though all that stands on its title-page. It is only one part of her life: it is
only her life of prayer. The title of the book, she says in one place, is
not her life at all, but The Mercies of God. Many other matters come up
incidentally in this delightful book, but the whole drift and the real
burden of the book is its author's life of prayer. Her attainments and her
experiences in prayer so baffled and so put out all her confessors that,
at their wits' end, they enjoined her to draw out in writing a complete
account of a secret life, the occasional and partial discovery of which so
amazed, and perplexed, and condemned them. And thus it is that we
come to possess this unique and incomparable autobiography: this
wonderful revelation of Teresa's soul in prayer. It is a book in which we
see a woman of sovereign intellectual ability working out her own
salvation in circumstances so different from our own that we have the
greatest difficulty in believing that it was really salvation at all she was
so working out. Till, as we read in humility and in love, we learn to
separate-off all that is local, and secular, and ecclesiastical, and

circumstantial, and then we immensely enjoy and take lasting profit out
of all that which is so truly Catholic and so truly spiritual. Teresa was
an extraordinary woman in every way: and that comes out on every
page of her Autobiography. So extraordinary that I confess there is a
great deal that she tells us about herself that I do not at all understand.
She was Spanish, and we are Scottish. She and we are wide as the poles
asunder. Her lot was cast of God in the sixteenth century, whereas our
lot is cast in the nineteenth. She was a Roman Catholic mystic, and we
are Evangelical Protestants. But it is one of the great rewards of
studying such a life as Teresa's to be able to change places with her so
as to understand her and love her. She was, without any doubt or
contradiction, a great saint of God. And a great saint of God is more
worthy of our study and admiration and imitation and love than any
other study or admiration or imitation or love on the face of the earth.
And the further away such a saint is from us the better she is for our
study and admiration and imitation and love, if we only have the sense
and the grace to see it.
Cervantes himself might have written Teresa's Book of the Foundations.
Certainly he never wrote a better book. For myself I have read Teresa's
Foundations twice at any rate for every once I have read Cervantes'
masterpiece. For literature, for humour, for wit, for nature, for
photographic pictures of the time and the people, her Foundations are a
masterpiece also: and then, Teresa's pictures are pictures of the best
people in Spain. And there was no finer people in the whole of
Christendom in that day than the best of the Spanish people. God had
much people in the Spain of that day, and he who is not glad to hear
that will never have a place among them. The Spain of that century was
full of family life of the most polished and refined