r works receive fresh light from her letters. The subjects of her
more elaborate writings are all handled in her letters in a far easier, a
far more natural, and a far more attractive manner. It is in her letters
that we first see the size and the strength and the sweep of her mind,
and discover the deserved deference that is paid to her on all hands.
Burdened churchmen, inquiring students in the spiritual life, perplexed
confessors, angry and remonstrating monks, husbands and wives, matrons
and maidens, all find their way to Mother Teresa. Great bundles of
letters are delivered at the door of her cell every day, and she works at
her answers to those letters till a bird begins to flutter in the top of
her head, after which her physician will not suffer her to write more
than twelve letters at a downsitting. And what letters they are, all
sealed with the name of JESUS--she will seal now with no other seal. What
letters of a strong and sound mind go out under that seal! What a
business head! What shrewdness, sagacity, insight, frankness, boldness,
archness, raillery, downright fun! And all as full of splendid sense as
an egg is full of meat. If Andrew Bonar had only read Spanish, and had
edited Teresa's _Letters_ as he has edited Rutherford's, we would have
had that treasure in all our houses. As it is, Father Coleridge long ago
fell on the happy idea of compiling a _Life of Teresa_ out of her extant
letters, and he has at last carried out his idea, if not in all its
original fulness, yet in a very admirable and praiseworthy way. But I
would like to know how many of the boasted literary and religious people
of Edinburgh have bought and read Father Coleridge's delightful book. A
hundred? Ten? Five? I doubt it. Or how many have so much as borrowed
from the circulating library Mrs. Cunninghame Graham's first-rate book?
Of Teresa's _Letters_, that greatest living authority on Teresa
says--'That long series of epistolary correspondence, so enchanting in
the original. It is in her letters that Teresa is at her best. They
reveal all her shrewdness about business and money matters; her talent
for administration; her intense interest in life, and in all that is
passing around her. Her letters show Teresa as the Castilian gentlewoman
who not only treats on terms of perfect equality with people of the
highest rank in the kingdom, but is in the greatest request by them. Her
letters, of which probably only a tithe rem