One of the best chapters in her autobiography, and perhaps the most interesting from our present point of view, is the allegory under which she describes the different kinds of prayer.  The simile is not original—­it appears in St. Augustine and others; but it is more fully worked out by St. Teresa, who tells us “it has always been a great delight to me to think of my soul as a garden, and of the Lord as walking in it.”  So here she says, “Our soul is like a garden, rough and unfruitful, out of which God plucks the weeds, and plants flowers, which we have to water by prayer.  There are four ways of doing this—­First, by drawing the water from a well; this is the earliest and most laborious process.  Secondly, by a water-wheel which has its rim hung round with little buckets.  Third, by causing a stream to flow through it.  Fourth, by rain from heaven.  The first is ordinary prayer, which is often attended by great sweetness and comfort.  But sometimes the well is dry.  What then?  The love of God does not consist in being able to weep, nor yet in delights and tenderness, but in serving with justice, courage, and humility.  The other seems to me rather to receive than to give.  The second is the prayer of quiet, when the soul understands that God is so near to her that she need not talk aloud to Him.”  In this stage the Will is absorbed, but the Understanding and Memory are still active. (Teresa, following the scholastic mystics, makes these the three faculties of the soul.) In the third stage God becomes, as it were, the Gardener.  “It is a sleep of the faculties, which are not entirely suspended, nor yet do they understand how they work.”  In the fourth stage, the soul labours not at all; all the faculties are quiescent.  As she pondered how she might describe this state, “the Lord said these words to me:  She (the soul) unmakes herself, my daughter, to bring herself closer to Me.  It is no more she that lives, but I. As she cannot comprehend what she sees, understanding she ceases to understand.”  Years after she had attained this fourth stage, Teresa experienced what the mystics call “the great dereliction,” a sense of ineffable loneliness and desolation, which nevertheless is the path to incomparable happiness.  It was accompanied by a kind of catalepsy, with muscular rigidity and cessation of the pulses.

These intense joys and sorrows of the spirit are the chief events of Teresa’s life for eight or ten years.  They are followed by a period of extreme practical activity, when she devoted herself to organising communities of bare-footed Carmelites, whose austerity and devotion were to revive the glories of primitive Christianity.  In this work she showed not only energy, but worldly wisdom and tact in no common degree.  Her visions had certainly not impaired her powers as an organiser and ruler of men and women.  Her labours continued without intermission till, at the age of sixty-seven, she was struck down by her last illness.  “This saint will be no longer wanted,” she said, with a sparkle of her old vivacity, when she knew that she was to die.