all
make such shipwreck and come so short. The sense of the reality of
divine and unseen things in Teresa's life of prayer is simply miraculous
in a woman still living among things seen and temporal. Her faith is
truly the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not
seen. Our Lord was as real, as present, as near, as visible, and as
affable to this extraordinary saint as ever He was to Martha, or Mary, or
Mary Magdalene, or the woman of Samaria, or the mother of Zebedee's
children. She prepared Him where to lay His head; she sat at His feet
and heard His word. She chose the better part, and He acknowledged to
herself and to others that she had done so. She washed His feet with her
tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head. She had been forgiven
much, and she loved much. He said to her, Mary, and she answered Him,
Rabboni. And He gave her messages to deliver to His disciples, who had
not waited for Him as she had waited. Till she was able to say to them
all that she had seen the Lord, and that He had spoken such and such
things within her. And hence arises what I may call the quite
extraordinary purity and spirituality of her life of prayer. 'Defecate'
is Goodwin's favourite and constant word for the purest, the most rapt,
the most adoring, and the most spiritual prayer. 'I have known men'--it
must have been himself--'who came to God for nothing else but just to
come to Him, they so loved Him. They scorned to soil Him and themselves
with any other errand than just purely to be alone with Him in His
presence. Friendship is best kept up, even among men, by frequent
visits; and the more free and defecate those frequent visits are, and the
less occasioned by business, or necessity, or custom they are, the more
friendly and welcome they are.' Now, I have sometimes wondered what took
Teresa so often, and kept her so long, alone with God. Till I remembered
Goodwin's classical passages about defecated prayer, and understood
something of what is involved and what is to be experienced in pure and
immediate communion with God. And, then, from all that it surely
follows, that no one is fit for one moment to have an adverse or a
hostile mind, or to pass an adverse or a hostile judgment, on the divine
manifestations that came to Teresa in her unparalleled life of prayer; no
one who is not a man of like prayer himself; no, nor even then. I know
all the explanations that have been put forward for