er. I
had rather believe every syllable of Teresa's so-staggering locutions and
visions than be left to this, that ever since Paul and John went home to
heaven our Lord's greatest promises have been so many idle words. It is
open to any man to scoff and sneer at Teresa's extraordinary life of
prayer, and at the manifestations of the Father and the Son that were
made to her in her life of prayer, and some of her biographers and
censors among ourselves have made good use of their opportunity. But I
cannot any longer sit with them in the seat of the scorner, and I want
you all to rise up and leave that evil seat also. Lord, how wilt Thou
manifest Thyself in time to come to me? How shall I attain to that faith
and to that love and to that obedience which shall secure to me the long-
withheld presence and indwelling of the Father and the Son?

* * * * *

Teresa's _Autobiography_, properly speaking, is not an autobiography at
all, though it ranks with _The Confessions_, and _The Commedia_, and _The
Grace Abounding_, and _The Reliquiae_, as one of the very best of that
great kind of book. It is not really Teresa's _Life Written by Herself_,
though all that stands on its title-page. It is only one part of her
life: it is only her life of prayer. The title of the book, she says in
one place, is not her life at all, but _The Mercies of God_. Many other
matters come up incidentally in this delightful book, but the whole drift
and the real burden of the book is its author's life of prayer. Her
attainments and her experiences in prayer so baffled and so put out all
her confessors that, at their wits' end, they enjoined her to draw out in
writing a complete account of a secret life, the occasional and partial
discovery of which so amazed, and perplexed, and condemned them. And
thus it is that we come to possess this unique and incomparable
autobiography: this wonderful revelation of Teresa's soul in prayer. It
is a book in which we see a woman of sovereign intellectual ability
working out her own salvation in circumstances so different from our own
that we have the greatest difficulty in believing that it was really
salvation at all she was so working out. Till, as we read in humility
and in love, we learn to separate-off all that is local, and secular, and
ecclesiastical, and circumstantial, and then we immensely enjoy and take
lasting profit out of all that which is so truly Catholic and so truly
spiritual. Teresa wa