them by the original authorities, or without allowing for the Vaticanist pre-assumption which, to do him justice, he never for a moment conceals.'

ART. II-SANTA TERESA.

Santa Teresa: being some account of her Life and Times, together with some pages from the history of the last great Reform in the Religious Orders. By GABRIELA CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM. Two vols. (London, 1894.)

WE should be interested to know under what happy inspiration it was that Mrs. Cunninghame Graham was moved to write The Life and Times of Santa Teresa. It is a common subject of complaint in this later day of ours that all fields of historic knowledge are already trodden, that the ground is everywhere preoccupied, and that nothing is left for the literary aspirant but to reproduce with what freshness he may some new aspect of an already exhausted theme. The work before us is a stirring rebuke of all such groundless complaining. Here is a subject, more than three centuries and a half old, buried beneath the dust of an age and conditions utterly unlike our own. Santa Teresa's life was passed under circumstances which in less skilful hands would have made it arid as the desert lands of Seville, amidst which most of it was spent ; and lo! by the touch of genius it rises before us vivid with thrilling reality, with stirring movement, and with deepest interest. Despite the presence of competing volumes ever appearing from the press with remorseless rapidity; despite the impatience and prejudice with which the jaded critic approaches a work of a thousand closely

1 Since this article was in type, Cardinal Vaughan has delivered an address to the Catholic Truth Society Conference at Preston, in which, inter alia, he reproduces, by way of appeal to Anglicans, Cardinal Wiseman's parallelism between their position and that of the Donatists. We hope his Eminence did not perceive that he was employing a flagrant petitio principii. The argument, as he himself presents it, assumes that the Anglican Church is in schism, and that the Catholic Church of St. Augustine's time now simply exists as the Roman communion, in distinction and separation not only from Protestants or from Anglicans, but from the whole orthodox East. In other words, it has logically nothing to say to any minds but such as have already decided the case against England and for Rome. We will add, that the famous dictum of St. Augustine, Securus judicat orbis terrarum (to which the Cardinal does not refer), can only be claimed for Rome by a wilful or careless ignoring of the context, which identifies the orbis terrarum with the whole Christian body (cf. C. Epist. Parmen. iii. 2.4).

printed pages; despite the dead and buried interest which it might be thought could alone attach to a movement centred upon a state of things that is now almost forgotten as a dream when one awaketh,' we have devoured Mrs. Cunninghame Graham's biography with unflagging appetite to the very last morsel. That we are entirely in accord with the authoress on all points is not to be anticipated. That we should have welcomed some further condensation, for the writer's sake as well as the reader's-for big books, however able, with difficulty secure due attention nowadays-we may candidly allow. But, taking Santa Teresa as it stands, we have no hesitation in pronouncing it to be an historical biography of a very high order, worthy to take its place beside the best historical work of the present generation. Nor can the labour bestowed by Mrs. Graham on her subject be deemed superfluous. So far as English literature is concerned, we believe that she has traversed ground hitherto untrodden, and we have even searched the columns of the Nouvelle Biographie Générale of Messrs. Didot in vain for any account of the illustrious Teresa Cepeda de Ahumada.

Let us first give some of our reasons in justification of our hearty panegyric. Mrs. Graham brings special qualities to the adequate fulfilment of her task. Herself a native of Spain, she has studied with intelligent and sympathetic interest the natural features of the district where Santa Teresa laboured, and she is literally saturated with the spirit of her age. Rarely indeed has any book been written which reproduces so exactly the local colour of the scenes which it describes, or which follows with such unwearied and painful diligence every clue that can aid in the development of its story. Each fresh and subordinate actor as he appears, in a drama that was strikingly diversified and which included in its course some pre-eminent names, affords the opportunity for a lucid episode which in telling strokes sketches out his career and so helps to give completeness to the main action of the piece. Those who have experience in historical writing will understand how vast is the labour involved in thus following up side issues; whilst the time and pains bestowed on Santa Teresa herself, on her life, her motives and her writings, must have been enormous; and the work has been done with a thoroughness and, withal, with an eloquence of no common order. We shall see how heartily Mrs. Graham sympathises with her subject, and with what contempt she looks upon the habits of her own contemporaries of this nineteenth century as she compares them with her heroine,

'who scorned delights and lived laborious days.' Her book affords a fresh illustration of the adage that genius is only an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Yet we may question whether Teresa herself would have welcomed a biography which, whilst it is so highly appreciative of the woman, holds in such small esteem the spiritual influences under whose heavenly guidance the Spanish saint ever consciously acted. We can understand the scornful incredulity with which Mrs. Graham glances at the puerile farrago of senseless legend and indiscriminate miracle beneath which the lives of so many Romish saints are frequently smothered. The purposeless and self-inflicted indignities, the revolting puerilities, the mechanical inspiration, which only serve, as the authoress expresses it, to lessen and belittle Teresa's real greatness, are properly set aside; but, unless so perspicacious a writer has singularly failed to express her own convictions, we should fear that Mrs. Graham has herself abandoned the faith that all Anglo-Catholics hold dear. She adopts without reserve Spinoza's assertion that the pretended revelations of the prophets had no existence beyond their own imagination (i. 182). She speaks of the narrow limits within which Christianity permits the emancipation of women (p. 283). She holds that the example of Teresa' may still inspire us with something of the old fighting spirit, as we cast down the gauntlet, not for dogma, but fearlessly in the face of it, for abstract Right and abstract Reason, as being the highest ends Humanity can aim at' (p. 429). She speaks of sanctity and humanity as sworn foes (ii. 51), and of theology as in opposition to reason (ib. p. 96). Nor is she content with such passing gibes as these at religion and dogma, which it is the fashion of many contemporary writers to scatter broadcast o'er their pages. Two brief extracts will show how complete is the author's abandonment of Christianity, and how shadowy and mournful, in contrast with the joy of Christian assurance, is the philosophy she has substituted for it. In the first passage Mrs. Graham is speaking of Teresa's mysticism, which she affirms to be

'robust and healthy when compared with the unhealthy and sickly sentimentality which seems invariably to form the dominant note in the religious literature of to-day. Is it strange [she continues], in an age when man was supposed to be constantly in communication with the supernatural, that, thirsting with Divine Love, she thought she had cleared the mysterious abyss which separates humanity from the shadow of the Divinity? And if it was but a false and fallacious dream, like so many others that have

consoled and strengthened generations of the living-a dream as unreal as Christianity itself—what of that, if thence she brought that strange radiance which clung to her in life, and in death refused to leave her that rare perfection and purity and humility of life, on which the most sceptical have never dared to cast a doubt? Who would wish her dream undreamed? who would wish the illusion dissipated?' (i. 168).

So, then, Christianity at its best is but a beneficent hallucination. In the second extract we could fancy we were listening to some fatalistic utterance of Greek tragedy, wherein Destiny and Duty, spelt with a capital D, preside in place of the Christian Trinity over the affairs of mortal men. The very opening sentence of the quotation shows how singularly inadequate is Mrs. Graham's estimate of the future. reward which crowns the believer's career at its conclusion, and gives completeness to what, without it, would be ofttimes so abrupt an ending.

'It is,' we read, 'for the young and inexperienced traveller, to encourage him to fresh exertion, that hope casts its glittering mirage over the dusty road of life; with the buoyancy of youth and the weight of years the illusory glow vanishes, and he finds himself face to face with a gray and relentless destiny, and with the strange fact that the endless revolutions of the world have not taught wisdom to her children. But Teresa has arisen to a loftier altitude, where the mind has ceased to need all such fictitious aid; in her own unrival-· led expression, "her soul was securely seated on its own housetop." What matter if all is a shadow whether in the theological sense or one philosophical; what matter if life is but a fleeting and unsubstantial phantasmagoria, if through the gloom one star alone, the star of Duty, casts its pale fine radiance to the outskirts of eternity, and she can say, like the magi of old, "Vidimus stellam ejus in oriente, et venimus"? It is the highest state to which humanity can attain, to which but few have attained, for it is even a reflex, however dim and obscured, of the calm impersonality of the Divinity' (ii. 48).

This conception of a 'calm impersonality' was hardly the ground of the confidence which Teresa expresses in the words to which it serves on Mrs. Graham's page as the introduction, 'Blessed be God (she writes to her friend the Duchess of Alba) that we shall rejoice in Him securely for Eternity; for certainly we can count on nothing here, what with these absences and changes.'

With this preliminary warning of the spirit in which the work before us is written, we pass to the life itself. The period in which Teresa was transition for all southern Europe. out of medievalism, but Spain still

VOL. XXXIX.-NO. LXXVII.

born was one of critical The world was creeping retained many and deep

D

traces of the fashion that was passing away. Only two years before her birth Luther had published his famous theses at Wittenberg, and but twenty years earlier the warriors of her birthplace in the van of the Castilian army had helped to terminate the struggle of centuries in the decisive battle of Granada. The cry for faith and fatherland was raised through the entire Peninsula with a unanimity and with a ferocity begotten of perils which had shaken the Christian suzerainty to its foundations. Their effects were seen in the ruthless expulsion of the Jews, and in the consequent commercial ruin of the nation; in the stern suppression of every rising of the Moors, from whose hands the country had been won inch by inch, and whose kinsmen on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean still gave well-grounded cause for apprehension and watchfulness; and in the establishment of the terrible Inquisition, designed to extirpate heresy from Spanish soil, with power so despotic and unlimited that it could snatch the Bible from the dying hands and longing eyes of Charles V. To the irresistibly imperative demands of an unexpected current of events Mrs. Graham traces the gloomy cloud of bigotry that overshadowed Spain and drained it of its strength never again

to return.

'Yet for the moment at least,' as she says, 'under the auspices of a bigot and the thumbscrew of the Inquisitor, the Catholic faith rallied into a purer and more brilliant flame than she had known for many centuries, or was destined to know again. The religious conscience of the age had never been more profoundly stirred. From every religious corporation in the country the war-cry went forth that was meant to give the counter blast to Protestantism. Spain it was that forced the Pope to hold the Council of Trent; Spanish prelates and friars who in that assembly insisted on the reform of the religious orders and the clergy. Never had the faithful been more magnificently munificent; never have the ecclesiastical annals of Spain been rendered illustrious by a larger number of great and good menmen of pure and unblemished life, of noble and earnest aspirations. New bodies were founded every day; many of them offering positive and material advantages to the social needs of the period' (i. 33, 34).

Nor was it only in the domain of religious enthusiasm that Spain was at this juncture pre-eminent. The entire nation vibrated with the excitement, the cupidity, the romantic dreams kindled by the discovery of the New World. In every branch of art, in every field of thought, in every class of literature-in architecture and painting and music and poetry and philosophy-the foremost rank may be claimed for the land whose monarch pensioned Titian and planned the