Transcribed from the 1900 Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier edition ,
THEODIDACTA
AFFICIENS
INFLAMMANS
With some of the best passages of the Saint’s Writings Selected Adapted and Arranged by
Alexander Whyte
d.d.
Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier
Saint Mary Street, Edinburgh, and
21 Paternoster Square, London
1900
Third Edition
Completing 6000 copies
Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to her Majesty
With a view to the work of my classes this session, I took oldAbraham Woodhead’s two black-letter quartos with me to the Engadine last July. And I spent every rainy morning and every tired evening of that memorable holiday month in the society of Santa Teresa and her excellent old-English translator. Till, ever, as I crossed the Morteratch and theRoseg, and climbed the hills around Maloggia and Pontresina, a voice would come after me, saying to me, Why should you not shareall this spiritual profit and intellectual delight with your Sabbath evening congregations, and with your young men’s and young women’s classes? Why should you not introduce Santa Teresa to her daughters in Edinburgh? For her daughters they are, so soon and as long as they live in self-knowledge and in self-denial, in humility and in meekness, and especially in unceasing prayer for themselves and for others. p. 2And I am not without some assurance that in this present lecture I am both hearing and obeying one ofthose same locutions that Teresa heard so frequently, and obeyed with such instancy and fidelity and fruitfulness.
* * * * *
Luther was born in 1483, and he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the University Church of Wittenberg on the 31st October 1517. Loyola was born in 1491, and Xavier in 1506, and the Society of Jesus was established in 1534. Isabella the Catholic was born in 1451, and our own Protestant Elizabeth in 1533. The Spanish Inquisition began to sit in 1483, the Breviary was finally settled in 1568, and the Armada was destroyed in 1588. Columbus was born in 1446, and he set out on his great enterprise in 1492. Cervantes was born in 1547, and the First Part of his immortal work was published in 1605. And it is to be read in Santa Teresa’s Breviaryto this day that Teresa the Sinner was born on the 29th day of March 1515, at five o’clock in the morning. She died in 1582, and in 1622 she was publicly canonised at Rome along with Loyola and Xavier and two other Spanish saints.
Teresa was greatly blessed in both her p. 3parents. ‘It helped me much that I never saw my father or my mother respect anything in any one but goodness.’ Her fatherwas a great reader of the best books, and he took great pains that his children should form the same happy habit and should carefully cultivate the same excellent taste. Her mother, while a Christian gentlewoman of the first social standing, did not share her husband’s love of serious literature. She passed far too much of her short lifetime among the romances of the day, till her daughter has to confess that she took no little harm from the books that did her mother no harm but pastime to read. As for other