That relatively to the command ’Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect’, and before the eye of his own pure reason, the best of men may deem himself mere folly and imperfection, I can easily conceive; but this is not the case in question.  It is here a comparison of one man with all others of whom he has known or heard;—­’ergo’, a matter of experience; and in this sense it is impossible, without loss of memory and judgment on the one hand, or of veracity and simplicity on the other.  Besides, of what use is it?  To draw off our conscience from the relation between ourselves and the perfect ideal appointed for our imitation, to the vain comparison of one individual self with other men!  Will their sins lessen mine, though they were greater?  Does not every man stand or fall to his own Maker according to his own being?

Ib. p. 45.

I see not what one thing there is of so many as are to be found in the whole world, wherein there is need of a greater courage than to treat of committing treason against a king, and to know that he knows it well, and yet never to go out of his presence.  For howsoever it be very true that we are always in the presence of God; yet methinks that they who converse with him in prayer are in his presence after a more particular manner; for they are seeing then that he sees them; whereas others may, perhaps, remain some days in his presence, yet without remembering that he looks upon them.

A very pretty and sweet remark:  truth in new feminine beauty!

‘In fine’.

How incomparably educated was Teresa for a mystic saint, a mother of transports and fusions of spirit!

1.  A woman;

2.  Of rank, and reared delicately;

3.  A Spanish lady;

4.  With very pious parents and sisters;

5.  Accustomed in early childhood to read “with most believing heart” all the legends of saints, martyrs, Spanish martyrs, who fought against the Moors;

6.  In the habit of privately (without the knowledge of the superstitious Father) reading books of chivalry to her mother, and then all night to herself.

7.  Then her Spanish sweet-hearting, doubtless in the true Oroondates style—­and with perfect innocence, as far as appears; and this giving of audience to a dying swain through a grated window, on having received a lover’s messages of flames and despair, with her aversion at fifteen or sixteen years of age to shut herself up for ever in a strict nunnery, appear to have been those mortal sins, of which she accuses herself, added, perhaps to a few warm fancies of earthly love;

8.  A frame of exquisite sensibility by nature, rendered more so by a burning fever, which no doubt had some effect upon her brain, as she was from that time subject to frequent fainting fits and ‘deliquia’: 

9.  Frightened at her Uncle’s, by reading to him Dante’s books of Hell and Judgment, she confesses that she at length resolved on nunhood because she thought it could not be much worse than Purgatory—­and that purgatory here was a cheap expiation for Hell for ever;