in the sumptuousness of our banquets and in the costliness of our furniture and our works of art, and be your companions and equals in social distinctions, and be enrolled with you as leaders of society.”  On the contrary they said, “We ask nothing from you.  We do not wish to be rich.  We prefer poverty.  We would not be encumbered with useless impediments—­too much camp equipage—­while marching to do battle with the forces of the Devil.  Christ is our Captain.  He can take care of his own troops.  He will not let us starve.  And if we do suffer, what of that?  He suffered for our sake, shall we not suffer for his cause?”

The Convent of St. Joseph was founded in 1562, after Theresa had passed twenty-nine years in the Convent of the Incarnation.  She died, 1582, at the age of sixty-seven, after twenty years of successful labors in the convent she had founded; revered by everybody; the friend of some of the most eminent men in Spain, including the celebrated Borgia, ex-Duke of Candia, and General of the Jesuits, who took the same interest in Theresa that Fenelon did in Madame Guyon.  She lived to see established sixteen convents of nuns, all obeying her reformed rule, and most of them founded by her amid great difficulties and opposition.  When she founded the Carmelite Convent of Toledo she had only four ducats to begin with.  Some one objected to the smallness of the sum, when she replied, “Theresa and this money are indeed nothing; but God and Theresa and four ducats can accomplish anything.”  It was amid the fatigues incident to the founding a convent in Burgos that she sickened and died.

It was not, however, merely from her labors as a reformer and nun that Saint Theresa won her fame, but also for her writings, which blaze with genius, although chiefly confined to her own religious experience.  These consist of an account of her own life, and various letters and mystic treatises, some description of her spiritual conflicts and ecstasies, others giving accounts of her religious labors in the founding of reformed orders and convents; while the most famous is a rapt portrayal of the progress of the soul to the highest heaven.  Her own Memoirs remind one of the “Confessions of Saint Augustine,” and of the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis.  People do not read such books in these times to any extent, at least in this country, but they have ever been highly valued on the continent of Europe.  The biographers of Saint Theresa have been numerous, some of them very distinguished, like Ribera, Yepez, and Sainte Marie.  Bossuet, while he condemned Madame Guyon for the same mystical piety which marked Saint Theresa, still bowed down to the authority of the writings of the saint, while Fleury quotes them with the decrees of the Council of Trent.