the ages of forty and fifty:  there was a long gap between the two periods, and during the last twenty years of her life, when she was actively engaged in founding and visiting religious houses, she saw them no more.  This experience was that of many other saints of the cloister.  Spiritual consolations seem to be frequently granted to encourage young beginners;[297] then they are withdrawn, and only recovered after a long period of dryness and darkness; but in later life, when the character is fixed, and the imagination less active, the vision fades into the light of common day.  In considering St. Teresa’s visions, we must remember that she was transparently honest and sincere; that her superiors strongly disliked and suspected, and her enemies ridiculed, her spiritual privileges; that at the same time they brought her great fame and influence; that she was at times haunted by doubts whether she ever really saw them; and, lastly, that her biographers have given them a more grotesque and materialistic character than is justified by her own descriptions.

She tells us herself that her reading of St. Augustine’s Confessions, at the age of forty-one, was a turning-point in her life.  “When I came to his conversion,” she says, “and read how he heard the voice in the garden, it was just as if the Lord called me.”  It was after this that she began again to see visions—­or rather to have a sudden sense of the presence of God, with a suspension of all the faculties.  In these trances she generally heard Divine “locutions.”  She says that “the words were very clearly formed, and unmistakable, though not heard by the bodily ear.  They are quite unlike the words framed by the imagination, which are muffled” (cosa sorda).  She describes her visions of Christ very carefully.  First He stood beside her while she was in prayer, and she heard and saw Him, “though not with the eyes of the body, nor of the soul.”  Then by degrees “His sacred humanity was completely manifested to me, as it is painted after the Resurrection.” (This last sentence suggests that sacred pictures, lovingly gazed at, may have been the source of some of her visions.) Her superiors tried to persuade her that they were delusions; but she replied, “If they who said this told me that a person who had just finished speaking to me, whom I knew well, was not that person, but they knew that I fancied it, doubtless I should believe them, rather than what I had seen; but if this person left behind him some jewels as pledges of his great love, and I found myself rich having been poor, I could not believe it if I wished.  And these jewels I could show them.  For all who knew me saw clearly that my soul was changed; the difference was great and palpable.”  The answer shows that for Teresa the question was not whether the manifestations were “subjective” or “objective,” but whether they were sent by God or Satan.