r while she was
yet a beautiful girl. It was a succession of serious illnesses, taken
along with her father's scrupulous care over her, that brought Teresa
back to the simple piety of her early childhood, and fixed her for life
in an extraordinary devotion to God, and to all the things of God. When
such a change of heart and character comes to a young woman among
ourselves, she usually seeks out some career of religion and charity to
which she can devote her life. She is found labouring among the poor and
the sick and the children of the poor, or she goes abroad to foreign
mission work. In Teresa's land and day a Religious House was the
understood and universal refuge for any young woman who was in earnest
about her duty to God and to her own soul. In those Houses such young
women secluded themselves from all society and gave themselves up to the
care of the poor and the young. In the more strict and enclosed of those
retreats the inmates never came out of doors at all, but wholly
sequestered themselves up to a secret life of austerity and prayer. This
was the ideal life led in those Houses for religious women. But Teresa
soon found out the tremendous mistake she had made in leaving her
father's family-fireside for a so-called Religious House. No sooner had
she entered it than she was plunged headlong into those very same
'pestilent amusements,' the mere approach of which had made her flee to
this supposed asylum. Though she is composing her Autobiography under
the sharp eyes of her confessors, and while she is writing with a
submissiveness and, indeed, a servility that is her only weakness, Teresa
at the same time is bold enough and honest enough to tell us her own
experiences of monastic life in language of startling strength and
outspokenness. 'A short-cut to hell. If parents would take my advice,
they would rather marry their daughters to the very poorest of men, or
else keep them at home under their own eye. If young women will be
wicked at home, their wickedness will not long be hidden at home; but in
monasteries, such as I speak of, their worst wickedness can be completely
covered up from every human eye. And all the time the poor things are
not to blame. They only walk in the way that is shown them. Many of
them are to be much pitied, for they honestly wish to withdraw from the
world, only to find themselves in ten times worse worlds of sensuality
and all other devilry. O my God! if I might I woul