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.

And there she remained a year, with no relief to her sufferings for
three months. Her only recreation was books, which fortified her
courage. She sought instruction, but found no one who could instruct her
so as to give repose to her struggli