d had subdued their
hearts, we read but little of penances, or self-expiations, or forms of
worship, or church ceremonies, or priestly rigors, or any of the
slaveries and formalities which bound ordinary people. Their piety was
mystical, sometimes visionary, and not always intelligible, but deep,
sincere, and lofty. Of the two women, I think Saint Theresa was the more
remarkable, and had the most originality. Madame Guyon seems to have
borrowed much from her, especially in her methods of prayer.

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