Socrates himself never roasted them better.
Again, like his, her irony and her raillery and her satire are sometimes
so delicate that it quite eludes you for the first two or three readings
of the exquisite page. And then, when you turn the leaf, she is as
ostentatiously stupid and ignorant and dependent on your superior mind as
ever Socrates himself was. Till I shrewdly suspect that no little of
that 'obedience' which so intoxicated and fascinated her inquisitors, and
which to this day so exasperates some of her biographers, was largely
economical and ironical. Her narrow cell is reported to have often
resounded with peals of laughter to the scandal of some of her sisters.
In support of all that, I have marked a score of Socratic passages in
Woodhead, and Dalton, and Lewis, and Father Coleridge, and Mrs.
Cunninghame Graham. They are very delicious passages and very tempting.
But were they once begun there would be no end to them. You will believe
Froude, for he is an admitted judge in all matters connected with the
best literature, and he says in his _Quarterly_ article on Teresa's
writings, 'The best satire of Cervantes is not more dainty.'

The great work to which Teresa gave up her whole life, after her full
conversion, was the purification of the existing monastic system, and the
multiplication and extension of Religious Houses of the strictest,
severest, most secluded, most prayerful, and most saintly life. She had
been told by those she too much trusted, that the Church of Christ was
being torn in pieces in Germany, and in Switzerland, and in France, and
in England by a great outbreak of heretical error; and, while the Society
of Jesus and the Secret Inquisition were established to cope with all
such heresy, Teresa set herself to counteract it by a widespread
combination of unceasing penance and intercessory prayer. It was a zeal
without knowledge; but there can be no doubt about the sincerity, the
single-mindedness, and the strength of the zeal. For forty as
hard-working years as ever any woman spent in this world, Teresa laboured
according to her best light to preserve the purity and the unity of the
Church of Christ. And the strength and the sagacity of mind, the tact,
the business talents, the tenacity of will, the patience, the endurance,
the perseverance, the sleepless watchfulness, and the abounding
prayerfulness that she brought to bear on the reformation and
multiplication of her fortresses of d