www.freecatholicebooks.com Title: Santa Teresa an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings Author: Alexander Whyte Santa Teresa: an Appreciation _With some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings Selected Adapted and Arranged by_ _Alexander Whyte_ _D.D._ _Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier_ _Saint Mary Street_, _Edinburgh_, _and_ 21 _Paternoster Square_, _London_ www.freecatholicebooks.com 1900 _Third Edition_ _Completing_ 6000 _copies_ Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to her Majesty APPRECIATION AND INTRODUCTION 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 www.freecatholicebooks.com 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. www.freecatholicebooks.com 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 www.freecatholicebooks.com 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, www.freecatholicebooks.com 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 www.freecatholicebooks.com 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 www.freecatholicebooks.com 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.' www.freecatholicebooks.com 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 www.freecatholicebooks.com 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