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