soul, the grandest fact in all revelations, and hence society did not relax into Paganism.  Penance would save the soul, though surrounding it with gloom, maceration, heavy labors, bitter tears, terrible anxieties.  The wearied pilgrim, the isolated monk, the weeping nun, the groaning peasant, the penitent baron, were not thrown into absolute despair, since there was a possibility of appeasing divine wrath, and since they all knew that Christ had died in order to save some,—­yea, all who conformed to the direction of those spiritual guides which the Church and the age imposed.

Such was Catholic theology when Theresa—­an enthusiastic, amiable, and virtuous girl of sixteen, but at one time giddy and worldly—­wished to enter a convent for the salvation of her soul.  She says she was influenced by servile fear, and not by love.  It is now my purpose to show how this servile fear was gradually subdued by divine grace, and how she became radiant with love,—­in short, an emancipated woman, in all the glorious liberty of the gospel of Christ; although it was not until she had passed through a most melancholy experience of bondage to the leading ideas of her Church and age.  It is this emancipation which made her one of the great women of history, not complete and entire, but still remarkable, especially for a Spanish woman.  It was love casting out fear.

After a mental struggle of three months, Theresa resolved to become a nun.  But her father objected, partly out of his great love for her, and partly on account of her delicate and fragile body.  Her health had always been poor:  she was subject to fainting fits and burning fevers.  Whether her father, at last, consented to her final retirement from the world I do not discover from her biography; but, with his consent or without it, she entered the convent and assumed the religious habit,—­not without bitter pangs on leaving her home, for she did violence to her feelings, having no strong desire for monastic seclusion, and being warmly attached to her father.  Neither love to God nor a yearning after monastic life impelled the sacrifice, as she admits, but a perverted conscience.  She felt herself in danger of damnation for her sins, and wished to save her soul, and knew no other way than to enter upon the austerities of the convent, which she endured with remarkable patience and submission, suffering not merely from severities to which she was unaccustomed, but great illness in consequence of them.  A year was passed in protracted miseries, amounting to martyrdom, from fainting fits, heart palpitations, and other infirmities of the body.  The doctors could do nothing for her, and her father was obliged to order her removal to a more healthful monastery, where no vows of enclosure were taken.