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.

SOME SELECTED PASSAGES

* The translations in the following pages are mainly those of Woodhead and Lewis.

TERESA ON HERSELF

I had a father and a mother who both feared God.  My father had his chief delight in the reading of good books, and he did his best to give his children the same happy taste.  This also helped me much, that I never saw my father or my mother regard anything but goodness.  Though possessing very great beauty in her youth, my mother was never known to set any store by it.  Her apparel, even in her early married life, was that of a woman no longer young.  Her life was a life of suffering, her death was most Christian.  After my mother’s removal, I began to think too much about my dress and my appearance, and I pursued many such like things that I was never properly warned against, full of mischief though they were both to myself and to others.  I too early learned every evil from an immoral relative.  I was very fond of this woman’s company.  I gossiped and talked with her continually.  She assisted me to all the amusements I loved; and, what was worse, she found some very evil amusements for me, and in every way communicated to me her own vanities and mischiefs.  I am amazed to think on the evil that

one bad companion can do; nor could I have believed it, unless I had known it by experience.  The company and the conversation of this one woman so changed me that scarcely any trace was left in me of my natural disposition to virtue.  I became a perfect reflection of her and of another who was as bad as she was.

For my education and protection my father sent me to the Augustinian Monastery, in which children like myself were brought up.  There was a good woman in that religious house, and I began gradually to love her.  How impressively she used to speak to me of God!  She was a woman of the greatest good sense and sanctity.  She told me how she first came to herself by the mere reading of these words of the Gospel, ‘Many are called and few chosen.’  This good companionship began to root out the bad habits I had brought to that house with me; but my heart had by that time become so hard that I never shed a tear, no, not though I read the whole Passion through.  When at last I entered the Religious House of the Incarnation for life, our Lord at once made me understand how He helps those who do any violence to themselves in order to serve Him.  No one observed this violence in me.  They saw nothing in me but the greatest goodwill.  At that sore step I was filled with a joy so great that it has never wholly left me to this day.  God converted the dryness of my soul into the greatest tenderness, immediately on my taking up that cross.  Everything in religion was now a real delight to me.  I had more pleasure now in sweeping