and love of
order the whole of the House into which she had been carried to die. She
saw everything put into its proper place, and every one answering to
their proper order, after which she attended the divine offices for the
day, and then went back to her bed and summoned her daughters around her.
'My children,' she said, 'you must pardon me much; you must pardon me
most of all the bad example I have given you. Do not imitate me. Do not
live as I have lived. I have been the greatest sinner in all the world.
I have not kept the laws I made for others. I beseech you, my daughters,
for the love of God, to keep the rules of your Holy Houses as I have
never kept them. O my Lord,' she then turned to Him and said, 'the hour
I have so much longed for has surely come at last. The time has surely
come that we shall see one another. My Lord and Saviour, it is surely
time for me to be taken out of this banishment and be for ever with Thee.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart,
O God, Thou wilt not despise. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and
take not Thy Holy Spirit away from me. Create in me a clean heart, O
God.' 'A broken and a contrite heart; a broken and a contrite heart,'
was her continual cry till she died with these words on her lips, 'A
broken and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.' And, thus, with the
most penitential of David's penitential Psalms in her mouth, and with the
holy candle of her Church in her hand, Teresa of Jesus went forth from
her banishment to meet her Bridegroom.

O sweet incendiary! shew here thy art
Upon this carcass of a cold hard heart;
Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light that play
Among the leaves of thy large books of day,
Combined against this breast at once break in
And take away from me myself and sin;
This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be,
And thy best fortune such fair spoils of me.
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
And all thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire;
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His;
By all the Heavens thou hast in Him,
(Fair sister of the Sera