The influence of Saint Theresa’s life and writings has been eminent and marked, not only in the Catholic but in the Protestant Church.  If not direct, it has been indirect.  She had that active, ardent nature which sets at defiance a formal piety, and became an example to noble women in a more enlightened, if less poetic, age.  She was the precursor of a Madame de Chantal, of a Francis de Sales, of a Mere Angelique.  The learned and saintly Port Royalists, in many respects, were her disciples.  We even see a resemblance to her spiritual exercises in the “Thoughts” of Pascal.  We see her mystical love of the Saviour in the poetry of Cowper and Watts and Wesley.  The same sentiments she uttered appear even in the devotional works of Jeremy Taylor and Jonathan Edwards.  The Protestant theology of the last century was in harmony with hers in its essential features.  In the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of Bunyan we have no more graphic pictures of the sense of sin, the justice of its punishment, and the power by which it is broken, than are to be found in the writings of this saintly woman.  In no Protestant hymnals do we find a warmer desire for a spiritual union with the Author of our salvation; in none do we see the aspiring soul seeking to climb to the regions of eternal love more than in her exultant melodies.

     “For uncreated charms I burn,
       Oppressed by slavish fears no more;
     For One in whom I may discern,
       E’en when He frowns, a sweetness I adore.”

That remarkable work of Fenelon in which he defends Madame Guyon, called “Maxims of the Saints,” would equally apply to Saint Theresa, in fact to all those who have been distinguished for an inward life, from Saint Augustine to Richard Baxter,—­for unselfish love, resignation to the divine will, self-renunciation, meditation too deep for words, and union with Christ, as represented by the figure of the bride and bridegroom.  This is Christianity, as it has appeared in all ages, both among Catholic and Protestant saints.  It may seem to some visionary, to others unreasonable, and to others again repulsive.  But this has been the life and joy of those whom the Church has honored and commended.  It has raised them above the despair of Paganism and the superstitions of the Middle Ages.  It is the love which casteth out fear, producing in the harassed soul repose and rest amid the doubts and disappointments of life.  It is not inspired by duty; it does not rest on philanthropy; it is not the religion of humanity.  It is a gift bestowed by the Father of Lights, and will be, to remotest ages, the most precious boon which He bestows on those who seek His guidance.

AUTHORITIES.

Vie de Sainte Therese, ecrite par elle-meme; Lettres de Sainte Therese; Les Ouvrages de Sainte Therese; Biographie Universelle; Fraser’s Magazine, lxv. 59; Butler’s Lives of the Saints; Digby’s Ages of Faith; the Catholic Histories of the Church, especially Fleury’s “Maxims of the Saints.”  Lives of Saint Theresa by Ribera, Yepez, and Sainte Marie.