It is not really Teresa's _Life Written by Herself_,
though all that stands on its title-page. It is only one part of her
life: it is only her life of prayer. The title of the book, she says in
one place, is not her life at all, but _The Mercies of God_. Many other
matters come up incidentally in this delightful book, but the whole drift
and the real burden of the book is its author's life of prayer. Her
attainments and her experiences in prayer so baffled and so put out all
her confessors that, at their wits' end, they enjoined her to draw out in
writing a complete account of a secret life, the occasional and partial
discovery of which so amazed, and perplexed, and condemned them. And
thus it is that we come to possess this unique and incomparable
autobiography: this wonderful revelation of Teresa's soul in prayer. It
is a book in which we see a woman of sovereign intellectual ability
working out her own salvation in circumstances so different from our own
that we have the greatest difficulty in believing that it was really
salvation at all she was so working out.
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