existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more.”  Change Nature to God, and you have a thought that remains Christian in character, for the first Fathers of the Church did not believe that the immortality of the soul was a natural gift—­that is to say, something rational—­but a divine gift of grace.  And that which is of grace is usually, in its essence, of justice, since justice is divine and gratuitous, not natural.  And Goethe added:  “I could begin nothing with an eternal happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me to overcome.”  And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of contemplation.

But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit, of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid?  Might we not say, perhaps, that it is necessary to preserve these exceptional types in order that they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind?  Do not men breed racehorses, which are useless for any practical kind of work, but which preserve the purity of the breed and become the sires of excellent hackneys and hunters?  Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less justifiable than any other sort of luxury?  But, on the other hand, is not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics, still less religion?  May not the contemplative, medieval, monastic ideal be esthetical, and not religious nor even ethical?  And after all, those of the seekers after solitude who have related to us their conversation when they were alone with God have performed an eternalizing work, they have concerned themselves with the souls of others.  And by this alone, that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de Jesus, is the cloister justified.

But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores, founded by Domingo de Guzman for the aggressive work of extirpating heresy; the Company of Jesus, a militia with the world as its field of operations (which explains its history); the order of the Escuelas Pias, also devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature, that of instruction.  I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the contemplative Order of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesus undertook was a Spanish work.  Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.

It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the cloister.  They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more free.  “Is it not a fine thing that a poor nun of San Jose can attain to sovereignty over the whole earth and the elements?” said St. Teresa in her Life.  It was the Pauline yearning for liberty, the longing to shake off the bondage of the external law, which was then very severe, and, as Maestro Fray Luis de Leon said, very stubborn.