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,