Santa Teresa | Page 7

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 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