In truth, O my King, Thou didst
administer to me the most spiritual and painful of chastisements: for
Thou didst chastise my sins with great assurances of Thy love and of Thy
great mercy. It makes me feel beside myself when I call to mind Thy
great grace and my great ingratitude.'
This leads us up to the conception and commencement of that great work to
which Teresa dedicated the whole of her after life,--the reformation and
extension of the Religious Houses of Spain. The root-and-branch
reformation of Luther and his German and Swiss colleagues had not laid
much hold on Spain; and the little hold it had laid on her native land
had never reached to Teresa. Had Luther and Teresa but met: had
Melanchthon and Teresa but met: had the best books of the German and
Swiss Reformation but come into Teresa's hands: had she been somewhat
less submissive, and somewhat less obedient, and somewhat less completely
the slave of her ecclesiastical superiors; had she but once entered into
that intellectual and spiritual liberty wherewith Christ makes His people
free,--what a lasting blessing Teresa might have been made to her native
land! But, as it was, Teresa's reformation, while it was the salvation
of herself and of multitudes more who came under it, yet as a monastic
experiment and a church movement, it ended in the strengthening and the
perpetuation of that detestable system of intellectual and spiritual
tyranny which has been the death of Spain from that day to this.
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