Santa Teresa | Page 8

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?
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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 kind. And, with all their declensions and corruptions, the Religious Houses of Spain enclosed multitudes of the most saintly men and women. 'I never read of a