She was a very clever and ambitious girl, and with a mother's guiding hand removed she became impatient under the restraints which her stern old father, Don Alphonso, placed upon her. At sixteen she was an impetuous, worldly-minded, and very vain though very dignified young lady. Then her father, fearful as to her future, sent her to a convent, with orders that she should be kept in strict seclusion.
Such a punishment awoke all the feelings of conscientiousness and self-conviction that had so influenced her when she was a little girl, and Theresa, left to her own thoughts, first grew morbid, and then fell sick.
During her sickness she resolved to become a nun, persuaded her ever-faithful brother, Pedro, to become a friar, and when Don Alphonso, their father, refused his consent, the brother and sister, repeating the folly of their childhood, again ran away from home.
Then their father, seeing the uselessness of resistance, consented, and Theresa, at the age of twenty, entered a convent in Avila, and became a nun in what was known as the Order of the Carmelites.
The life of these nuns was strict, secluded, and silent; but the conscientious nature of Theresa found even the severities of this lonely life not sufficiently hard, and attaining to a position of influence in the order she obtained permission from the Pope in 1562 to found a new order which should be even more strict in its rules, and therefore, so she believed, more helpful. Thus was founded the Order of Barefooted Carmelites, a body of priests and nuns, who have in their peculiar way accomplished very much for charity, gentleness, and self-help in the world, and whose schools and convents have been instituted in all parts of the earth.
Theresa de Cepeda died in 1582, greatly beloved and revered for her strict but gentle life, her great and helpful charities, and her sincere desire to benefit her fellow-men. After her death, so great was the respect paid her that she was canonized, as it is called: that is, lifted up as an example of great goodness to the world; and she is to-day known and honored among devout Roman Catholics as St. Theresa of Avila.
Whatever we may think of the peculiar way in which her life was spent; however we may regard the story of her troubles with her conscience, her understanding of what she deemed her duty, and her sinking of what might have been a happy and joyous life in the solitude and severity of a convent, we cannot but think of her as one who wished to do right, and who desired above all else to benefit the world in which she lived and labored. Her story is that of a most extraordinary and remarkable woman, who devoted her life to what she deemed the thing demanded of her. Could we not, all of us, profitably attempt to live in something like a kindred spirit to that helpful and unselfish one that actuated this girl of the Spanish sierras?
"Here and there is born a Saint Theresa," says George Eliot, "foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed."But if a girl or boy, desiring to do right, will disregard the hindrances, and not simply sit and sob after an unattained goodness--if, instead, they will but do the duty nearest at hand manfully and well, the reward will come in something even more desirable than a "long-recognizable deed." It will come in the very self-gratification that will at last follow every act of courtesy, of friendliness, and of self-denial, and such a life will be of more real value to the world than all the deeds of all the crusaders, or than even the stern and austere charities of a Saint Theresa.
