At any rate, I would be if I did not revere and love and
imitate such a saint of God. Given God and His Son and His Holy Spirit:
given sin and salvation and prayer and a holy life; and, with many
drawbacks, Teresa's was just the life of self-denial and repentance and
prayer and communion with God that we should all live. It is not Teresa
who is to be bemoaned and blamed and called bad names. It is we who do
all that to her who are beside ourselves. It is we who need the beam to
be taken out of our own eye. Teresa was a mystery and an offence; and,
again, an encouragement and an example to the theologians and the
inquisitors of her day just as she still is in our day. She was a
stumbling-stone, or an ensample, according to the temper and disposition
and character of her contemporaries, and she is the same to-day.
The pressing question with me is not the truth or the falsehood, the
amount of reality or the amount of imagination in Teresa's locutions and
visions. The pressing question with me is this,--Why it is that I have
nothing to show to myself at all like them.
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