than to give. The second is the prayer of quiet, when the soul
understands that God is so near to her that she need not talk aloud to
Him." In this stage the Will is absorbed, but the Understanding and
Memory are still active. (Teresa, following the scholastic mystics,
makes these the three faculties of the soul.) In the third stage God
becomes, as it were, the Gardener. "It is a sleep of the faculties,
which are not entirely suspended, nor yet do they understand how they
work." In the fourth stage, the soul labours not at all; all the
faculties are quiescent. As she pondered how she might describe this
state, "the Lord said these words to me: She (the soul) unmakes
herself, my daughter, to bring herself closer to Me. It is no more she
that lives, but I. As she cannot comprehend what she sees,
understanding she ceases to understand." Years after she had attained
this fourth stage, Teresa experienced what the mystics call "the great
dereliction," a sense of ineffable loneliness and desolation, which
nevertheless is the path to incomparable happiness. It was accompanied
by a kind of catalepsy, with muscular rigidity and cessation of the
pulses.

These intense joys and sorrows of the spirit are the chief events of
Teresa's life for eight or ten years. They are followed by a period of
extreme practical activity, when she devoted herself to organising
communities of bare-footed Carmelites, whose austerity and devotion
were to revive the glories of primitive Christianity. In this work she
showed not only energy, but worldly wisdom and tact in no common
degree. Her visions had certainly not impaired her powers as an
organiser and ruler of men and women. Her labours continued without
intermission till, at the age of sixty-seven, she was struck down by
her last illness. "This _saint_ will be no longer wanted," she said,
with a sparkle of her old vivacity, when she knew that she was to die.

It is not worth while to give a detailed account of St. Teresa's
mystical theology. Its cardinal points are that the religious life
consists in complete conformity to the will of God, so that at last
the human will becomes purely "passive" and "at rest"; and the belief
in Christ as the sole ground of salvation, on which subject she uses
language which is curiously like that of the Lutheran Reformers. Her
teaching about passivity and the "prayer of quiet" is identical with
that which the Pope afterwards condemned in Molinos; but it is only