With a view to the work of my classes this session, I took old Abraham
Woodhead's two black-letter quartos with me to the Engadine last July.
And I spent every rainy morning and every tired evening of that memorable
holiday month in the society of Santa Teresa and her excellent
old-English translator. Till, ever, as I crossed the Morteratch and the
Roseg, and climbed the hills around Maloggia and Pontresina, a voice
would come after me, saying to me, Why should you not share all this
spiritual profit and intellectual delight with your Sabbath evening
congregations, and with your young men's and young women's classes? Why
should you not introduce Santa Teresa to her daughters in Edinburgh? For
her daughters they are, so soon and as long as they live in
self-knowledge and in self-denial, in humility and in meekness, and
especially in unceasing prayer for themselves and for others. And I am
not without some assurance that in this present lecture I am both hearing
and obeying one of those same locutions that Teresa heard so frequently,
and obeyed with such instancy and fidelity and fruitfulness.
* * * * *
Luther was born in 1483, and he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door
of the University Church of Wittenberg on the 31st October 1517. Loyola
was born in 1491, and Xavier in 1506, and the Society of Jesus was
established in 1534. Isabella the Catholic was born in 1451, and our own
Protestant Elizabeth in 1533. The Spanish Inquisition began to sit in
1483, the Breviary was finally settled in 1568, and the Armada was
destroyed in 1588. Columbus was born in 1446, and he set out on his
great enterprise in 1492. Cervantes was born in 1547, and the First Part
of his immortal work was published in 1605. And it is to be read in
Santa Teresa's Breviary to this day that Teresa the Sinner was born on
the 29th day of March 1515, at five o'clock in the morning. She died in
1582, and in 1622 she was publicly canonised at Rome along with Loyola
and Xavier and two other Spanish saints.
Teresa was greatly blessed in both her parents. 'It helped me much that
I never saw my father or my mother respect anything in any one but
goodness.' Her father was a great reader of the best books, and he took
great pains that his children should form the same happy habit and should
carefully cultivate the same excellent taste. Her mother, while a
Christian gentlewoman of the first social standing, did not share her
husband's love of serious literature. She passed far too much of her
short lifetime among the romances of the day, till her daughter has to
confess that she took no little harm from the books that did her mother
no harm but pastime to read. As for other things, her father's house was
a perfect model of the very best morals and the very best manners. Alonso
de Cepeda was a well-born and a well-bred Spanish gentleman. He came of
an ancient and an illustrious Castilian stock; and, though not a rich
man, his household enjoyed all the nobility of breeding and all the
culture of mind and all the refinement of taste for which Spain was so
famous in that great age. All her days, and in all her ups and downs in
life, we continually trace back to Teresa's noble birth and noble
upbringing no little of her supreme stateliness of deportment and
serenity of manner and chivalry of character. Teresa was a perfect
Spanish lady, as well as a mother in Israel, and no one who ever
conversed with her could for a moment fail to observe that the oldest and
best blood of Spain mantled in her cheek and shone in her eye. A lion
encompassed by crosses was one of the quarters of her father's coat of
arms. And Teresa took that up and added out of it a new glory to all her
father's hereditary honours. For his daughter was all her days a lioness
palisaded round with crosses, till by means of them she was transformed
into a lamb. But, all the time, the lioness was still lurking there.
Teresa's was one of those sovereign souls that are born from time to time
as if to show us what our race was created for at first, and for what it
is still destined. She was a queen among women. She was in intellect
the complete equal, and in still better things than intellect far the
superior, of Isabella and Elizabeth themselves. As she says in an
outspoken autobiographic passage, hers was one of those outstanding and
towering souls on which a thousand eyes and tongues are continually set
without any one understanding them or comprehending them. Her coming
greatness of soul is foreseen by some of her biographers in the attempt
which she made while yet a child to escape away into the country of the
Moors in search of an early martyrdom, so that she might see her Saviour
all the sooner, and stand in His presence all the purer. 'A woman,' says
Crashaw, 'for angelical height of speculation: for masculine courage of
performance, more than a woman; who, while yet a child, outran maturity,
and durst plot a martyrdom.
Scarce had she learnt to lisp the name
Of martyr, yet she thinks it shame
Life should so long sport with that breath,
Which, spent, can buy so brave a death.
Scarce had she blood enough to make
A guilty sword blush for her sake;
Yet has she heart dares hope to prove
How much less strong is death than love.
Be love but there, let poor six years
Be posed with the maturest fears
Man trembles at, we straight shall find
Love knows no nonage, nor the mind.'
Teresa's mother died just when her daughter was at that dangerous age in
which a young girl needs a wise mother most; 'the age when virtue should
begin to grow,' as she says herself. Teresa was an extraordinarily
handsome and attractive young lady, and the knowledge of that, as she
tells us, made her very vain, and puffed up her heart with foolish
imaginations. She has a powerful chapter in the opening of her
Autobiography on dangerous companionships in the days of youth. 'Oh that
all parents would take warning by me, and would look carefully into their
children's early friendships!' She suffered terribly from bad health all
her days, and that severe chastisement began to fall on her while she was
yet a beautiful girl. It was a succession of serious illnesses, taken
along with her father's scrupulous care over her, that brought Teresa
back to the simple piety of her early childhood, and fixed her for life
in an extraordinary devotion to God, and to all the things of God. When
such a change of heart and character comes to a young woman among
ourselves, she usually seeks out some career of religion and charity to
which she can devote her life. She is found labouring among the poor and
the sick and the children of the poor, or she goes abroad to foreign
mission work. In Teresa's land and day a Religious House was the
understood and universal refuge for any young woman who was in earnest
about her duty to God and to her own soul. In those Houses such young
women secluded themselves from all society and gave themselves up to the
care of the poor and the young. In the more strict and enclosed of those
retreats the inmates never came out of doors at all, but wholly
sequestered themselves up to a secret life of austerity and prayer. This
was the ideal life led in those Houses for religious women. But Teresa
soon found out the tremendous mistake she had made in leaving her
father's family-fireside for a so-called Religious House. No sooner had
she entered it than she was plunged headlong into those very same
'pestilent amusements,' the mere approach of which had made her flee to
this supposed asylum. Though she is composing her Autobiography under
the sharp eyes of her confessors, and while she is writing with a
submissiveness and, indeed, a servility that is her only weakness, Teresa
at the same time is bold enough and honest enough to tell us her own
experiences of monastic life in language of startling strength and
outspokenness. 'A short-cut to hell. If parents would take my advice,
they would rather marry their daughters to the very poorest of men, or
else keep them at home under their own eye. If young women will be
wicked at home, their wickedness will not long be hidden at home; but in
monasteries, such as I speak of, their worst wickedness can be completely
covered up from every human eye. And all the time the poor things are
not to blame. They only walk in the way that is shown them. Many of
them are to be much pitied, for they honestly wish to withdraw from the
world, only to find themselves in ten times worse worlds of sensuality
and all other devilry. O my God! if I might I would fain speak of some
of the occasions of sin from which Thou didst deliver me, and how I threw
myself into them again. And of the risks I ran of utterly shipwrecking
my character and good name and from which Thou didst rescue me. O Lord
of my soul! how shall I be able to magnify Thy grace in those perilous
years! At the very time that I was offending Thee most, Thou didst
prepare me by a most profound compunction to taste of the sweetness of
Thy recoveries and consolations. In truth, O my King, Thou didst
administer to me the most spiritual and painful of chastisements: for
Thou didst chastise my sins with great assurances of Thy love and of Thy
great mercy. It makes me feel beside myself when I call to mind Thy
great grace and my great ingratitude.'
This leads us up to the conception and commencement of that great work to
which Teresa dedicated the whole of her after life,--the reformation and
extension of the Religious Houses of Spain. The root-and-branch
reformation of Luther and his German and Swiss colleagues had not laid
much hold on Spain; and the little hold it had laid on her native land
had never reached to Teresa. Had Luther and Teresa but met: had
Melanchthon and Teresa but met: had the best books of the German and
Swiss Reformation but come into Teresa's hands: had she been somewhat
less submissive, and somewhat less obedient, and somewhat less completely
the slave of her ecclesiastical superiors; had she but once entered into
that intellectual and spiritual liberty wherewith Christ makes His people
free,--what a lasting blessing Teresa might have been made to her native
land! But, as it was, Teresa's reformation, while it was the salvation
of herself and of multitudes more who came under it, yet as a monastic
experiment and a church movement, it ended in the strengthening and the
perpetuation of that detestable system of intellectual and spiritual
tyranny which has been the death of Spain from that day to this. Teresa
performed a splendid service inside the Church to which she belonged: but
that service was wholly confined to the Religious Houses that she founded
and reformed. Teresa's was intended to be a kind of counter-reformation
to the reformation of Luther and Melanchthon and Valdes and Valera. And
such was the talent and the faith and the energy she brought to bear on
the work she undertook, that, had it been better directed, it might have
been blessed to preserve her beloved native land at the head of modern
Christendom. But, while that was not to be, it is the immense talent,
and the unceasing toil, and the splendid faith and self-surrender that
Teresa brought to bear on her intramural reformation; and, all through
that, on the working out of her own salvation,--it is all these things
that go to make Teresa's long life so memorable and so impressive, not
only in her own age and land and church, but wherever greatness of mind,
and nobleness of heart, and sanctity of life, and stateliness of
character are heard of and are esteemed.
Teresa's intellect, her sheer power of mind, is enough of itself to make
her an intensely interesting study to all thinking men. No one can open
her books without confessing the spell of her powerful understanding. Her
books, before they were books, absolutely captivated and completely
converted to her unpopular cause many of her most determined enemies.
Again and again and again we find her confessors and her censors
admitting that both her spiritual experiences and her reformation work
were utterly distasteful and very stumbling to them till they had read
her own written account, first of her life of prayer and then of her
reformation work. One after another of such men, and some of them the
highest in learning and rank and godliness, on reading her autobiographic
papers, came over to be her fearless defenders and fast friends. There
is nothing more delightful in all her delightful Autobiography, and in
the fine 'censures' that have 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 the existing monastic system, and the
multiplication and extension of Religious Houses of the strictest,
severest, most secluded, most prayerful, and most saintly life. She had
been told by those she too much trusted, that the Church of Christ was
being torn in pieces in Germany, and in Switzerland, and in France, and
in England by a great outbreak of heretical error; and, while the Society
of Jesus and the Secret Inquisition were established to cope with all
such heresy, Teresa set herself to counteract it by a widespread
combination of unceasing penance and intercessory prayer. It was a zeal
without knowledge; but there can be no doubt about the sincerity, the
single-mindedness, and the strength of the zeal. For forty as
hard-working years as ever any woman spent in this world, Teresa laboured
according to her best light to preserve the purity and the unity of the
Church of Christ. And the strength and the sagacity of mind, the tact,
the business talents, the tenacity of will, the patience, the endurance,
the perseverance, the sleepless watchfulness, and the abounding
prayerfulness that she brought to bear on the reformation and
multiplication of her fortresses of defence and attack in that holy war,
all taken together, make up one of the most remarkable pages in the whole
history of the Church of Christ. Her difficulties with Rome, with the
Inquisition, with her more immediate superiors, confessors, and censors,
and, most of all, with the ignorance, the stupidity, the laziness, the
malice, and the lies of those monks and nuns whose reformation she was
determined on: her endless journeys: her negotiations with
church-leaders, landowners, and tradesmen in selecting and securing
sites, and in erecting new religious houses: the adventures, the
accidents, the entertainments she met with: and the fine temper, the good
humour, the fascinating character, the winning manners she everywhere
exhibited; and, withal, her incomparable faith in the Living God, and the
exquisite inwardness, unconquerable assurance, and abounding fruitfulness
of her own and unshared method and secret of prayer,--had Teresa not
lived and died in Spain, and had she not spent her life and done her work
under the Roman obedience, her name would have been a household word in
Scotland. As it is, she is not wholly unknown or unloved. And as
knowledge extends, and love, and good-will; and as suspicion, and fear,
and retaliation, and party-spirit die out among us, the truth about
Teresa and multitudes more will become established on clearer and deeper
and broader foundations; and we shall be able to hail both her and
multitudes more like her as our brothers and sisters in Christ, whom
hitherto we have hated and despised because we did not know them, and had
been poisoned against them. I am a conspicuous case in point myself. And
when I have been conquered by a little desultory reading and by a little
effort after love no man need despair. And if you will listen to this
lecture with a good and honest heart: with a heart that delights to hear
all this good report about a fellow-believer: then He who has begun that
good work in you will perfect it by books and by lectures like this, and
far better than this, till you are taken absolutely captive to that
charity which rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth: and
which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
endureth all things. Follow after charity, and begin with Santa Teresa.
Forbid it, mighty Love, let no fond hate
Of names or words so far prejudicate;
Souls are not Spaniards too; one friendly flood
Of baptism blends them all into one blood.
What soul soe'er in any language can
Speak heaven like hers, is my soul's countryman.
But the greatest and the best talent that God gives to any man or woman
in this world is the talent of prayer. And the best usury that any man
or woman brings back to God when He comes to reckon with them at the end
of this world is a life of prayer. And those servants best put their
Lord's money to the exchangers who rise early and sit late, as long as
they are in this world, ever finding out and ever following after better
and better methods of prayer, and ever forming more secret, more
steadfast, and more spiritually fruitful habits of prayer: till they
literally pray without ceasing, and till they continually strike out into
new enterprises in prayer, and new achievements, and new enrichments. It
was this that first drew me to Teresa. It was her singular originality
in prayer and her complete captivity to prayer. It was the time she
spent in prayer, and the refuge, and the peace, and the sanctification,
and the power for carrying on hard and unrequited work that she all her
life found in prayer. It was her fidelity and her utter surrender of
herself to this first and last of all her religious duties, till it
became more a delight, and, indeed, more an indulgence, than a duty. With
Teresa it was prayer first, and prayer last, and prayer always. With
Teresa literally all things were sanctified, and sweetened, and made
fruitful by prayer. In Teresa's writings prayer holds much the same
place that it holds in the best men and women of Holy Scripture. If I
were to say that about some of the ladies of the Scottish Covenant, you
would easily believe me. But you must believe me when I tell you that
about a Spanish lady, second to none of them in holiness of life, even if
her holy life is not all cast in our mould. All who have read the
autobiographic _Apologia_ will remember the fine passage in which its
author tells us that ever since his conversion there have been two, and
only two, absolutely self-luminous beings in the whole universe of being
to him,--God and his own soul. Now, I do not remember that Newman even
once speaks about Teresa in any of his books, but I always think of him
and her together in this great respect. GOD is to them both, and to them
both He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. And it is just
here, at the very commencement and centre of divine things, that we all
make such shipwreck and come so short. The sense of the reality of
divine and unseen things in Teresa's life of prayer is simply miraculous
in a woman still living among things seen and temporal. Her faith is
truly the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not
seen. Our Lord was as real, as present, as near, as visible, and as
affable to this extraordinary saint as ever He was to Martha, or Mary, or
Mary Magdalene, or the woman of Samaria, or the mother of Zebedee's
children. She prepared Him where to lay His head; she sat at His feet
and heard His word. She chose the better part, and He acknowledged to
herself and to others that she had done so. She washed His feet with her
tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head. She had been forgiven
much, and she loved much. He said to her, Mary, and she answered Him,
Rabboni. And He gave her messages to deliver to His disciples, who had
not waited for Him as she had waited. Till she was able to say to them
all that she had seen the Lord, and that He had spoken such and such
things within her. And hence arises what I may call the quite
extraordinary purity and spirituality of her life of prayer. 'Defecate'
is Goodwin's favourite and constant word for the purest, the most rapt,
the most adoring, and the most spiritual prayer. 'I have known men'--it
must have been himself--'who came to God for nothing else but just to
come to Him, they so loved Him. They scorned to soil Him and themselves
with any other errand than just purely to be alone with Him in His
presence. Friendship is best kept up, even among men, by frequent
visits; and the more free and defecate those frequent visits are, and the
less occasioned by business, or necessity, or custom they are, the more
friendly and welcome they are.' Now, I have sometimes wondered what took
Teresa so often, and kept her so long, alone with God. Till I remembered
Goodwin's classical passages about defecated prayer, and understood
something of what is involved and what is to be experienced in pure and
immediate communion with God. And, then, from all that it surely
follows, that no one is fit for one moment to have an adverse or a
hostile mind, or to pass an adverse or a hostile judgment, on the divine
manifestations that came to Teresa in her unparalleled life of prayer; no
one who is not a man of like prayer himself; no, nor even then. I know
all the explanations that have been put forward for Teresa's 'locutions'
and revelations; but after anxiously weighing them all, the simplest
explanation is also the most scientific, as it is the most scriptural. If
our ascending Lord actually said what He is reported to have said about
the way that He and His Father will always reward all love to Him, and
the keeping of all His commandments; then, if there is anything true
about Teresa at all, it is this, that from the day of her full conversion
she lived with all her might that very life which 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 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 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
hermit,' said Dr. Johnson to Boswell in St. Andrews, 'but in imagination
I kiss his feet: I never read of a monastery, but I could fall on my
knees and kiss the pavement. I have thought of retiring myself, and have
talked of it to a friend, but I find my vocation is rather in active
life.' It was such monasteries as Teresa founded and ruled and wrote the
history of that made such a sturdy Protestant as Dr. Johnson was say such
a thing as that. _The Book of the Foundations_ is Teresa's own account,
written also under superior orders, of that great group of religious
houses which she founded and administered for so many years. And the
literature into which she puts all those years is literature of the first
water. A thousand times I have been reminded of Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza as I read Teresa's account of her journeys, and of the people, and
of the escapades, and of the entertainments she met with. Yes, quite as
good as Cervantes! yes, quite as good as Goldsmith!--I have caught myself
exclaiming as I read and laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks. This
is literature, this is art without the art, this is literary finish
without the labour: and all laid out to the finest of all uses, to tell
of the work of God, and of all the enterprises, providences, defeats,
successes, recompenses, connected with it. The _Foundations_ is a
Christian classic even in Woodhead's and Dalton's and David Lewis's
English, what must it then be to those to whom Teresa's exquisite Spanish
is their mother-tongue!
If Vaughan had but read _The Foundations_, which he is honest enough to
confess he had only glanced at in a French translation, it would surely
have done something to make him reconsider the indecent and disgraceful
attack which he makes on Teresa. His chapter on Teresa is a contemptuous
and a malicious caricature. Vaughan has often been of great service to
me, but if I had gone by that misleading chapter, I would have lost weeks
of most intensely interesting and spiritually profitable reading.
Vaughan's extravagant misrepresentation of Teresa will henceforth make me
hesitate to receive his other judgments till I have read the books
myself. I shall not tarry here to controvert Vaughan's utterly
untruthful chapter on Teresa, I shall content myself with setting over
against it Crashaw's exquisite _Hymn_ and _Apology_, and especially his
magnificent _Flaming Heart_.
Teresa's _Way of Perfection_ is a truly fine book: full of freshness,
suggestiveness, and power. So much so, that I question if William Law's
_Christian Perfection_ would ever have been written, but that Teresa had
written on that same subject before him. I do not say that Law
plagiarised from Teresa, but some of his very best passages are plainly
inspired by his great predecessor. You will thank me for the following
eloquent passage from Mrs. Cunninghame Graham, which so felicitously
characterises this great book, and that in language such as I could not
command. 'To my thinking Teresa is at her best in her _Way of
Perfection_ with its bursts of impassioned eloquence; its shrewd and
caustic irony; its acute and penetrating knowledge of human character,
the same in the convent as in the world; above all in its sympathetic and
tender instinct for the needs and difficulties of her daughters. _The
Perfection_ represents the finished and magnificent fabric of the
spiritual life. Her words ring with a strange terseness and earnestness
as she here pens her spiritual testament. She points out the mischievous
foibles, the little meannesses, the spirit of cantankerousness and
strife, which long experience of the cloister had shown her were the
besetting sins of the conventual life. She places before them the
loftier standard of the Cross. Her words, direct and simple, ring out
true and clear, producing somewhat the solemn effect of a Commination
Service.' Strong as that estimate is, _The Perfection_ deserves every
word of it and more.
Teresa thought that her _Mansions_ was one of her two best books, but she
was surely far wrong in that. _The Mansions_, sometimes called _The
Interior Castle_, to me at any rate, is a most shapeless, monotonous, and
wearisome book. Teresa had a splendid imagination, but her imagination
had not the architectonic and dramatic quality that is necessary for
carrying out such a conception as that is which she has laid in the
ground-plan of this book. No one who has ever read _The Purgatorio_ or
_The Holy War_ could have patience with the shapeless and inconsequent
_Mansions_. There is nothing that is new in the matter of the
_Mansions_; there is nothing that is not found in a far better shape in
some of her other books; and one is continually wearied out by her utter
inability to handle the imagery which she will not let alone. At the
same time, the persevering reader will come continually on characteristic
things that are never to be forgotten as he climbs with Teresa from
strength to strength on her way to her Father's House.
To my mind Teresa is at her very best, not in her _Mansions_ which she
made so much of, but in her _Letters_ which she made nothing of. I think
I prefer her _Letters_ to all her other books. A great service was done
to this fine field of literature when Teresa's letters were collected and
published. What Augustine's editor has so well said about Augustine's
letters I would borrow and would apply to Teresa's letters. All her
other works receive fresh light from her letters. The subjects of her
more elaborate writings are all handled in her letters in a far easier, a
far more natural, and a far more attractive manner. It is in her letters
that we first see the size and the strength and the sweep of her mind,
and discover the deserved deference that is paid to her on all hands.
Burdened churchmen, inquiring students in the spiritual life, perplexed
confessors, angry and remonstrating monks, husbands and wives, matrons
and maidens, all find their way to Mother Teresa. Great bundles of
letters are delivered at the door of her cell every day, and she works at
her answers to those letters till a bird begins to flutter in the top of
her head, after which her physician will not suffer her to write more
than twelve letters at a downsitting. And what letters they are, all
sealed with the name of JESUS--she will seal now with no other seal. What
letters of a strong and sound mind go out under that seal! What a
business head! What shrewdness, sagacity, insight, frankness, boldness,
archness, raillery, downright fun! And all as full of splendid sense as
an egg is full of meat. If Andrew Bonar had only read Spanish, and had
edited Teresa's _Letters_ as he has edited Rutherford's, we would have
had that treasure in all our houses. As it is, Father Coleridge long ago
fell on the happy idea of compiling a _Life of Teresa_ out of her extant
letters, and he has at last carried out his idea, if not in all its
original fulness, yet in a very admirable and praiseworthy way. But I
would like to know how many of the boasted literary and religious people
of Edinburgh have bought and read Father Coleridge's delightful book. A
hundred? Ten? Five? I doubt it. Or how many have so much as borrowed
from the circulating library Mrs. Cunninghame Graham's first-rate book?
Of Teresa's _Letters_, that greatest living authority on Teresa
says--'That long series of epistolary correspondence, so enchanting in
the original. It is in her letters that Teresa is at her best. They
reveal all her shrewdness about business and money matters; her talent
for administration; her intense interest in life, and in all that is
passing around her. Her letters show Teresa as the Castilian gentlewoman
who not only treats on terms of perfect equality with people of the
highest rank in the kingdom, but is in the greatest request by them. Her
letters, of which probably only a tithe remains, show us how marvellously
the horizon of her life had expanded, and how rapidly her fame had grown.
Perhaps no more finished specimen of epistolary correspondence has ever
been penned than those letters, written in the press of multifarious
occupations, and often late at night when the rest of the convent was
sleeping.'
Her confessor, who commanded Teresa to throw her _Commentary on the Song
of Solomon_ into the fire, was a sensible man and a true friend to her
reputation, and the nun who snatched a few leaves out of the fire did
Teresa's fame no service. Judging of the whole by the part preserved to
us, there must have been many things scattered up and down the destroyed
book well worthy of her best pen. The 'instance of self-esteem' which
Teresa so delightfully narrates is well worth all the burnt fingers its
preservation had cost the devoted sister: and up and down the charred
leaves there are passages on conduct and character, on obedience and
humility and prayer, that Teresa alone could have written. All the same,
as a whole, her _Commentary on the Song_ is better in the fire.
Her _Seven Meditations on the Lord's Prayer_ ran no danger of the
censor's fire. I have had occasion to read all the best expositions of
the Lord's Prayer in our language, and I am bound to say that for
originality and striking suggestiveness Teresa's _Seven Meditations_
stands alone. After I had written that extravagant sentence I went back
and read her little book over again, so sure was I that I must have
overpraised it, and that I would not be believed in what I have said
concerning it. But after another reading of the _Meditations_ I am
emboldened to let the strong praise stand in all its original strength. I
have passages marked in abundance to prove to demonstration the estimate
I have formed of this beautiful book, but I must forego myself the
pleasure and the pride of quoting them.
Sixteen Augustinian _Exclamations after having Communicated_: sixty-nine
_Advices to Her Daughters_, and a small collection of love-enflamed
_Hymns_, complete what remains to us of Teresa's writings.
Teresa died of hard work and worry and shameful neglect, almost to sheer
starvation. But she had meat to eat that all Anne Bartholomew's
remaining mites could not buy for her dying mother. And, strong in the
strength of that spiritual meat, Teresa rose off her deathbed to finish
her work. She inspected with all her wonted quickness of eye and love of
order the whole of the House into which she had been carried to die. She
saw everything put into its proper place, and every one answering to
their proper order, after which she attended the divine offices for the
day, and then went back to her bed and summoned her daughters around her.
'My children,' she said, 'you must pardon me much; you must pardon me
most of all the bad example I have given you. Do not imitate me. Do not
live as I have lived. I have been the greatest sinner in all the world.
I have not kept the laws I made for others. I beseech you, my daughters,
for the love of God, to keep the rules of your Holy Houses as I have
never kept them. O my Lord,' she then turned to Him and said, 'the hour
I have so much longed for has surely come at last. The time has surely
come that we shall see one another. My Lord and Saviour, it is surely
time for me to be taken out of this banishment and be for ever with Thee.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart,
O God, Thou wilt not despise. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and
take not Thy Holy Spirit away from me. Create in me a clean heart, O
God.' 'A broken and a contrite heart; a broken and a contrite heart,'
was her continual cry till she died with these words on her lips, 'A
broken and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.' And, thus, with the
most penitential of David's penitential Psalms in her mouth, and with the
holy candle of her Church in her hand, Teresa of Jesus went forth from
her banishment to meet her Bridegroom.
O sweet incendiary! shew here thy art
Upon this carcass of a cold hard heart;
Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light that play
Among the leaves of thy large books of day,
Combined against this breast at once break in
And take away from me myself and sin;
This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be,
And thy best fortune such fair spoils of me.
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
And all thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire;
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His;
By all the Heavens thou hast in Him,
(Fair sister of the Seraphim!);
By all of Him we have in thee;--
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die.