Her difficulties with Rome, with the
Inquisition, with her more immediate superiors, confessors, and censors,
and, most of all, with the ignorance, the stupidity, the laziness, the
malice, and the lies of those monks and nuns whose reformation she was
determined on: her endless journeys: her negotiations with
church-leaders, landowners, and tradesmen in selecting and securing
sites, and in erecting new religious houses: the adventures, the
accidents, the entertainments she met with: and the fine temper, the good
humour, the fascinating character, the winning manners she everywhere
exhibited; and, withal, her incomparable faith in the Living God, and the
exquisite inwardness, unconquerable assurance, and abounding fruitfulness
of her own and unshared method and secret of prayer,--had Teresa not
lived and died in Spain, and had she not spent her life and done her work
under the Roman obedience, her name would have been a household word in
Scotland. As it is, she is not wholly unknown or unloved. And as
knowledge extends, and love, and good-will; and as suspicion, and fear,
and retaliation, and party-spirit die out among us, the truth about
Teresa and multitudes more will become established on clearer and deeper
and broader foundations; and we shall be able to hail both her and
multitudes more like her as our brothers and sisters in Christ, whom
hitherto we have hated and despised because we did not know them, and had
been poisoned against them.
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