g 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 g